


In the corner of Maple and Vine

by but_seriously



Category: The Originals (TV), Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M, Pushing Daisies AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-11
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-01-08 09:10:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 46,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1130800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/but_seriously/pseuds/but_seriously
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Our brother's a vampire and you wake the dead. There, I said it. Nobody's running for the hills. Nobody's coming at us with pitchforks." </p><p>"It's the 21st century, Bekah. They'd use rifles." </p><p>/ or, the one where Rebekah exploits mug tricks for extra tips, Klaus is a passive-mostly-aggressive piemaker, and Caroline just wants to know why Klaus refuses to touch her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. a humble abode where both our routes meet

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is pretty much the brainchild of Amanda (aka habrina on tumblr) who - a million years and several months ago - so desperately wanted a klaroline/pushing daisies au, unwittingly making me realize that heck YEAH i want it too.
> 
> you don't really have to watch the show to understand what's going on here (but i'll be staring at you disaproving of your life choices because whimsical narratives! charming characters! offbeat murder-crime solving escapades! cinematography that'll blow your ass right into your couch and make you sty there for another episode or eight! see also: chi mcbride) (and do i even have to MENTION lee pace?)
> 
>  **tldr:** watch the show when you can. you are missing out on a gem. also, first touch - life, second touch - death. you'll get it later.
> 
> big thanks to my beta empirically-speaking on tumblr, and DJ for pretty much making me feel better about everything i ever write ever, including this.
> 
> enough rambling, let's get to the fic.

There's a certain time slot on Tuesdays between six and eight that business picks up. More coffee to be brewed, more pie to be had, more faces to remember—because if it's one thing The Pie Hole promises, it's that it wraps you up in a wonder of blueberry and butter and cream, and will never let you go.

(No but really, that's what it says on the menu. Rebekah can't even…whatever.)

Rebekah has given up trying to figure out why it's always on Tuesdays that more stains appear on her apron, why there never seems to be enough coffee going around despite putting a new pot up every fifteen minutes, why the tip jar disappears from the counter halfway into the two-hour bench. She usually finds it in the storage room in the back, with Matt huddled over it, counting quarters and dollar bills. She promises (read: threatens) not to tell Klaus if he splits the loot and hands over all the fivers.

She doesn't really mind it. Tuesdays are good days. Tuesdays are the days Klaus doesn't seem to be worked into his bones, and sometimes he even comes out of the kitchen to catch up with Marcel over the counter or to make sure nobody's  _stealing from the bloody tip jar again_  (Rebekah averts her eyes, Matt suddenly becomes interested in the till).

By nine, it turns around into something mellow and the new faces file out to make room for the regular ones: there's Professor Saltzman and his droopy tie, trying to smile uncertainly at her but always looking away before she can smile back. The Salvatore brothers who take twenty minutes ordering their usual peach cobbler because they're too busy firing passive-aggressive quips at each other from behind their menus or taking turns casting furtive glances at the petite brunette in the corner there, who enjoys her blueberry slice piping hot with a side of cream.

Rebekah goes back to wiping the counter and just waiting around until closing time, gives her brother an absent-minded peck on the cheek.

As she's hanging up her apron, she asks, just to make sure, "Are you sure you don't want to co—" to which Klaus will respond, "I'm fine where I am, Rebekah".

She turns out the lights and leaves the diner with Matt hand-in-hand, and when she looks back she can see her brother's silhouette through the blinds, working steadily into the night.

 

 

Rebekah has days off on Mondays, which is when Matt can be found working overtime. Between the Pie Hole and the Grille, he actually finds himself making ends meet – nothin' like paying the bills early.

Klaus has, on more than one occasion (and more than two with knives) yelled at them about the emptying of the tip jar, but he's never really  _exacted_  those threats, so Matt figures it's safe to keep poking his nose back in. It's not that he's not grateful to Klaus for the reluctant blessing of this job (he really is), but it's not like Klaus  _needs_  the extra bits or anything. He's been to their place, like, maybe three times, and dude's loaded. Rebekah always drags him real quick through the foyer and up the grand staircase—yeah, they call it  _the grand staircase_ —so he doesn't really have enough time to gawk or anything, but he sees enough.

And like he's said, Klaus doesn't mind. Sure, he brandishes knives and threatens to shove Matt's head into the oven, but he still lets Matt leave with his pockets stuffed with loose change.

Monday turns into Tuesday, and so it was then, at 7:15pm that he's rifling through the big glass jar that the doorknob of the room jiggles and turns. In skulks Kol, his hands powdered and his apron askew.

"You're not Bekah," Matt says flatly.

"You've good observation." The way Kol is staring reminds him of those documentaries he used to watch as a kid – the ones where Vicky would shut off the TV right as the panther crouches low, fur rippling, hind legs just springing to attack. "Right, jig is up, you know the drill: hand over those bills or you will never see the light of day."

Matt thins his lips and straightens his back against a mop. Kol comes and goes as he pleases, often over-baking the pies and messing up people's orders. He drops drinks out of spite and steals from the till, which to Matt – despite he himself stealing from the tip jar – is Major Asshole Behaviour. When he feels the need to, he leans over the counter at one of the regulars and says something Matt can't quite hear (probably something rude as hell), and while Klaus fumes and grates at losing yet another customer, Kol just picks at the bits of their uneaten pie and eventually, leaves.

Matt wonders why Klaus hasn't fired Kol yet, but whenever he brings it up, Rebekah always finds that she has something to do, like cleaning the windows. Which have already been cleaned that morning.

Three times.

Elijah comes and goes even less than Kol does, but never to work (as if). He goes over the books and checks to see if everything's working, and spends the rest of the time at his reserved spot with the day's newspaper and a cup of coffee (black no cream no sugar thank you). Matt sometimes brings him a plate of ginger cookies to soften him up some, as he does now, to bring up The Kol Thing.

"Now now, Matthew," Elijah says and rustles his newspaper pointedly, "I don't ask where it is you and Rebekah disappear to between the hours of six and eight on Tuesdays, do I?"

Matt would then shuffle away, wondering why no one was getting the point.

The  _point_  that: Kol seems to be able to get away with everything, and Matt, who happened to be in that unfortunate position with such unfortunate timing with such unfortunate choice of words, was about to find out why.

"You're a lunatic and a shit pie maker," Matt says, pocketing his findings. "So no."

"And you, dear boy, happen to be in an unfortunate position, with such unfortunate timing, with  _such_  unfortunate choice of words." In the dim lighting of the room, Kol's face contorts into something ugly, something monstrous.

 _Oh_ , Matt thinks.

 

 

Klaus sighs over Matt's limp body, his lip curling up with distaste at the way his neck bent at his shoulders. Rebekah's crying had died down into a soft whimper to silence, and she sits on the floor with Matt's torso cradled in her lap, black mascara tracking down her face.

"Rebekah, I…"

She shakes her head violently. "I don't want to hear it. Do it."

"I don't think you'd like—"

"Who the wanking hell  _cares_  what I'd like?" she damn well screams at him, her lips bloodless. Her shoulders aren't shaking and neither are her hands, but her eyes paint an ache in his throat, a rising in his chest. He swallows it down. "My boyfriend is  _dead_ , flat out dead, and you're worried I wouldn't want to hear how he died?" If her eyes were mad with grief before, now they're furious. "Fuck you."

Klaus wants to roll his eyes,  _Stop being such a drama queen_ , but the way Rebekah clings to Matt's dead body makes him swallow the " _He was going to die anyway. One day. The same way the sun rises and sets, the way the wind plucks out silver songs out of a wind chime, the way you're always late on Friday night shifts. It is nature, and it is life. Life, as it goes, goes. And things that go eventually have to—"_ speech he'd given on more than one occasion.

(On those occasions, his face has been slapped, shoved, or slammed before doors, which is why he's never gotten a chance to get to the end of the speech, which he was just pulling out of his ass, anyway.

Which he supposes is kind of a good thing, the whole interruption bit.)

But it's his sister, and she's upset, so he acquiesces hastily, bending down to touch Matt.

There's a zap of light where Klaus' forefinger touches Matt, and he sits up with a start, colour returning to his cheeks. Rebekah lets out a quiet sob, and he looks at Klaus: notes the way he's keeping a trained eye on his wristwatch, and groans.

"I'm dead, aren't I?" Matt doesn't wait for a response. "Just—shit. I'm dead."

Rebekah bites her lip. "I'm sorry."

Matt pinches the bridge of his nose. "Shit."

"I am so, so sorry, babe."

Matt's eyes soften. "You never call me that."

That, remarkably, makes her cry, which makes Matt pull her close, pressing kiss after kiss into her hair, her cheeks, her lips (which makes Klaus clears his throat pointedly).

"Right." Rebekah straightens herself. "Was it Kol?"

"Yeah," Matt says, fingering the collar around his broken neck. "Can't believe I died this way. In a friggen  _storage_  room." He looks down his shirt. "Covered in quarters."

"That's quite unfortunate," Klaus says, but he doesn't add  _Thirty-nine seconds._

"That's what Kol said," Matt shrugs. He tugs Rebekah closer. "I'm sorry. I love you."

"It doesn't have to be this way," she whispers, fingers buried deep into his cotton-clad chest. "You know that."

The smile on his face doesn't reach his eyes. "That's not a life I'd want."

"But you'd  _be_  with me." Rebekah's begging. It's such a rare sight to Klaus that he has to turn away, has to keep counting down the seconds, because that is  _not_  his sister on her knees, not his sister looking so lost as she pleads for the life of a boy that's already lost it. " _Please_."

Klaus shuffles his feet, an intruder in this moment that Rebekah and Matt had built for themselves. He's almost reluctant to remind them: "Thirty seconds."

"You listen to me," Matt says fiercely, "I love you. I love you when you think you're being a bitch, I love you on the days you wake up and somehow decide that you aren't worth loving, I love you in the quiet moments between six and eight that we sit in this room counting quarters, I—"

"You are not saying goodbye to me," Rebekah hisses through her teeth. She looks absolutely frightful then, and something registers in Matt's face.

"One more thing, Bekah—Kol. Before he… before he did me in, he did something weird, like veins popping 'round his eyes—"

"Time to go," Klaus says promptly, and Rebekah's eyes fly to his, wild, " _Nik—no_!"—

—but too late, a zing, a zap of light, and Matthew Donovan was dead once more.

Rebekah's shoulders shake, and her voice breaks. "You  _asshole_. He had ten seconds left—" Eyes wild, she struggles to take in a breath. "You hypocritical  _wank_ , it's not like you've never let someone live—"

Klaus is on her in an instant, and Rebekah backs away just the slightest, all thoughts chased from her mind in the way his eyes light up like an inferno about to swallow her whole. His voice is serpentine, his inflections laced with venom. "There are people around. They might  _hear_."

"That what, our brother is a vampire?" Rebekah snorts a tearful one while Klaus does everything short of tearing out his own hair and burning down the storage room to shut her up. She snorts again, turning her face into Matt's hair while he's still warm. "And you wake the dead. There, I said it. Nobody's running for the hills. Nobody's coming at us with pitchforks."

"It's the 21st century, Bekah. They'd use rifles."

"Whatever." Rebekah closes her eyes, trying to even her breathing. "Leave me be."

Klaus stands uncertainly, the fury washed out of his face. What do you do when your baby sister is crying over her dead boyfriend in a cramped storage room? "Are you sure you don't want to co—"

"I'm fine where I am, Nik."

He doesn't want to leave her there, but the front bell is jingling, they're one staff member short, and Klaus has pies to make.

 

 

Rebekah is standing by the counter on a quiet Thursday night, arranging the displayed pies and wiping down the curved countertops, because that's what she does on Thursday nights. Klaus would think that she'd be tired of this little diner with its dimpled buttercup walls and counters that constantly smell of sultanas, and most days he'd be right. These days, he'd find her staring out the display window at the passers-by, counting them as they come in one by one, lured by the smell of buttery dough and lemon zest.

(It says as much on the menus as well.)

Marcel strolls in, the bell jingling in his wake. It's not Tuesday, and Rebekah's a little confused, but she doesn't dwell on it. Just does her signature mug flip and asks how his day is going.

"How's your day going?"

She places the mint green mugs on the yellow rack, readies her pen hand and flips open her notebook.

Marcel drops into his usual Tuesday stool, chuckling. "Rebekah, Rebekah, Rebekah," he says in one long exhale, rewarding her mug tricks with a dazzling smile. "My business-only girl. You leave me wondering what you do for pleasure."

"Oh Marcel. There's a lot to be said about leaving things to the imagination," Rebekah quips in a mockery of fondness, running her hands down the front of her apron. Marcel's eyes follow them, not a subtle bone in his body as he catalogues the curve of her hips, the soft swell of her breasts. Rebekah knows she should be blushing by now,  _oh_ how Elijah would be furious at this, how Matt would clench his fists in the pockets of his jeans, but Elijah isn't here, and neither is Matt.

Marcel places a finger on his temple, smiling smiling smiling away. "And you do that so well."

Rebekah gives him a thin smile and cuts him a slice of his usual, sliding it in front of him. "One pancake pie, extra jam on the side."

Marcel smiles, but this time not at her, but at the delicious layers of pancake, butter, and glistening jam atop a crumbly crust dotted with pecans. Marcel was a pie man—more specifically, a jam man, with an appreciation for their fragrance and fruity taste. He owned vineyards in Italy and France, grew strawberries where he could, and even owned a little patisserie in Versailles. There was a rumour that, many years ago, he had convinced the mayor of Mystic Falls to have a Jam Appreciation Day every 3rd of March, which was dispelled when Damon Salvatore stepped up at the unveiling of the event like the cat that got the cream, while Marcel glowered by the sidelines.

It turns out people were entirely too appreciative of jam, which is how Klaus found himself dangerously short of it on the opening day of The Pie Hole—which is where Marcel swooped in, eager to make up for the loss of a day he held so dear.

Gratitude is something Klaus is not accustomed to feeling, but Marcel's supply of jam assured him a lifelong standing seat, and even a pie named after him.

Marcel digs a fork into the Marcel with gusto, all flirtatious pretence dropped. Rebekah turns away without as much as a nose wrinkle. Quite the professional she is, and she rounds up the thought with a thorough wipe-down of the counter.

 

 

It's a rainy Monday, and Rebekah really should be prepping for her pre-u courses, but instead she's unlocking the shiny double doors and reaching for her apron.

It's a goddamn travesty.

In the kitchen, Klaus is busy kneading away at some dough, his knuckles whitened by flour. Rebekah places a hand on his shoulder and he tenses, before realizing it's only his sister.

"People are asking about you," Rebekah says, peeping into the oven. "You hardly ever leave the kitchen these days."

Klaus doesn't say a word; doesn't even look up from his hands.

This is not a kitchen, Rebekah realizes, but a mausoleum. The buttercup walls gleam but they shouldn't, not in a place where all she wants is warmth in the buttery counters and definitely not in a place where dank silence is all she gets for trying to reach out, when it should be  _him_  touching her shoulder,  _him_  coming to check on her, especially after what he'd done, what he'll continue doing—

"Nik," she grits out. "I'm talking to you."

Klaus touches a mouldy strawberry and Rebekah watches over her shoulder as it blooms to life, juicy and red. He doesn't look up when he says distractedly, "I'm fine where I—"

"Sure." Rebekah gives a very unlady-like snort and slams the door of the oven shut. "You're miserable all the damn time and it's a right pain to be around."

"As opposed to  _Oh look I'm twirling mugs again pay attention to me,"_  Klaus chants, pounding down on the dough with unnecessary force.

"My mug tricks pay for the coffee cream!" Rebekah fumes. "Anyway, even Elijah agrees."She waves an arm at Elijah, who is seated behind the counter. He looks like he's resisting the urge to role his eyes; of  _course_  Rebekah would drag him into this.

"Don't mind me," he says idly, flipping through the morning's news. "Just here for my morning coffee and a dose of your transparent arguments."

Klaus grunts as he heaves a sack of flour onto the counter. "Oh come now brother, this argument could sure use your penny's worth."

"Just as this kitchen dourly needs your sarcasm," Elijah replies, licking his thumb and flicking a page. "Thought about a replacement for Matt yet?"

"I have, but Rebekah would sooner see us bankrupt than hire new help." Klaus passes the dough to his sister. "Apples and raspberries."

Rebekah sighs and covers her eyes with her hand. They've been through this. She needed time and then some to get over the fact that her boyfriend had  _died_ , killed by one of her own brothers no less, and more than honeyed crusts and extra tips, more than sympathetic smiles and extra days off. She needed –  _more_. She needed retribution, or the certain kind of satisfaction that came with watching someone's whole world burn down while you hold the matches. She didn't  _want_  to 'get over it', as Nik had succinctly put.

She pulls her hand away from her face and realizes that what she does want, what she does need, and what she does  _deserve_ , is to be angry.

 

 

Dangerously quiet, she sets down the rolling pin and turns to Klaus, clasps her hands together and lowers her head. "Are you there? It's me, Rebekah."

Klaus scowls. "What are you doing?"

"Praying, brother. To you," Rebekah says sweetly. "Dear Nik, do you think it's going to start snowing anytime soon? Christmas is almost here."

The air is sticky, the confusion on her brother's face enough to make her smirk into her fingertips.

"I'm feeling awfully sad lately," she continues, "and none of my brothers give a damn."

"Rebekah," Elijah begins, a warning in his tone, but she pays him no more attention than she would their competitors across the road.

Rebekah stares straight into Klaus' eyes. "And while you're at it, do you think you could make yourself less of a dick?"

Klaus feels dread settling in his stomach and in the way he keeps pounding on the dough, but he clenches his hands into fists, pushes it aside. "What do you think you're playing at?"

"I'm not playing at anything," Rebekah hisses through her teeth. " _You_ are, playing God with the touch of your finger, with your ridiculously-developed holier than thou complex—you think just because you keep your head down and say nothing that I don't see right through you?"

Elijah slaps the paper down on the counter. "Rebekah!"

Klaus rounds the table, and while his sleeves had long been pushed to his elbows, he's metaphorically rolling them up again. "If this is about your precious Matt—"

"Oh however did you figure it out?" Rebekah shrieks, moving around the table as well; doesn't want him  _anywhere_  near her— "He was the love of my life, and the fact that you—that both of you!—think it should be easy for me to just forget him,  _oh he's just another busboy_." She swipes furiously at her eyes. "You think a life is so dispensable—"

"Because it is!" Klaus thunders, and the rolling pin goes flying across the room. "Look—" He snatches up a berry and they watch it untwist its rotted leaves, its shrivelled form turning into something lush and beautiful. Then he drops it and he touches a mouldy apple, watches it bloom to life, and the berry he'd touched earlier turned rotten once more. He snatches up berry after berry, upending bowls and bottles, sending jars crashing to the checkered floor and pans flying to crash against the glass frames on the wall, until Elijah's suddenly across the room holding Klaus' arm in a vice grip, shielding him from a shaking Rebekah who was covering her eyes and screaming enough Nik stop that you've made your point  _you're scaring me_   _enough just stop_.

Klaus wrenches his arm away from Elijah. His breathing comes out in slow starts and stops, heavy in his ears. When he steps towards Rebekah she visibly balks, and he tries not to feel a twinge in his chest. "Now, I wonder what would happen if Elijah were to trip and fall, to hit his head and die. I could touch him and joy of joys, he would live—but what happens sixty seconds later?"

Rebekah shakes her head, I do not know; please don't make me say it. Klaus has her by the shoulders now, forcing her to look at him. " _You_  die, Rebekah, isn't that the damnedest thing? And I could touch you, bring you back, but then someone else would die, and then someone else, and it would go on and on and on. You think I enjoy playing God? Getting to pick who lives and who rots? It's not some form of  _divinity._ It's another notch on my belt." His voice lowers as he leans closer. Rebekah stares, transfixed: she's forgotten how to breathe. "What makes you think Matt's death would mean any different to me?"

Elijah sighs and pulls Rebekah away from him, wraps his arm around her with the mannerisms of an older brother who's not quite used to giving hugs. "That's enough damage for one morning, Klaus."

Rebekah snorts into Elijah's shoulder. "It's enough damage for two lifetimes.  _Kol_  would know." She pushes away from him, eyes wet and cheeks red – rips her apron off and throws it at Klaus' face. "I  _quit_."

"Third time this bloody month then?" Klaus retorts to her retreating back.

She shoots him a tear strained glare over her shoulder and all but kicks the glass doors open, causing a crack near the handles. Her yell of "I don't care, dick wad!" is audibly heard through the crisp morning.

"That's coming out of your paycheck!" Klaus roars after her, "if you're even lucky enough to get it, you  _ungrateful, tip-squandering_ —"

"Twelve!" Elijah bellows and Klaus flinches: rarely does he raise his voice, and this makes twice already. He reaches behind the barrels of flavouring and pulls out Klaus' not-so-secret stash of whiskey, and proceeds to Irish up his coffee.

Klaus plucks the bottle from Elijah and takes a swig. "Enlighten me."

Elijah ignores him until he's done stirring his coffee. He doesn't start speaking until he's back in his seat.

"Twelve on a scale of one to ten, on how much of a prick you have been." He makes a grand show of pulling back the sleeve of his jacket to glance at his wristwatch. "And it's only 7:30 in the morning. I say you've exceeded yourself, brother."

Klaus doesn't say a thing as he picks up the remnants of the argument, sweeping shattered glass into corners and straightening the picture frames. He scoops up the berries, sighs when they wilt in his hands. "She knows I mean well."

"No she doesn't," Elijah says simply. "She would, if you ever talked about it."

Klaus shrugs and places his rolling pin by his over-kneaded dough. It'd have to be thrown out. He scrapes it into the bin, his lip curling at the morning's waste. "Father… still blames me." It sounds resigned, strained—but he figures it has to be said. "For Kol. Rebekah doesn't, she wasn't there, but you can see it in her eyes sometimes, her little head just thinking away." He leans on the edge of the table and heaves another sigh. "More so since Matt died."

"Maybe that boy was right. Maybe we give Kol too much leeway." Elijah sounds bitter and angry and sad and Klaus kind of wants to cover his ears,  _I don't want to listen_ , no use wasting away on maybe's and what if's – wake him up when something new happens.

"At any rate, this is bad for the books. Get her back." The threat quiet clear in his voice, Elijah looks triumphant at how sullen his brother looks. "Drop the attitude, too. We offer pies and  _hospitality_  for heaven's sake." He starts to stand: coffee finished, yesterday's accounts sorted and today's bookkeeping ready to be botched up by Klaus (and much later, patched up by him Elijah) – this is why's he's the older brother, ever so wise. When he pushes on the door handle to leave it comes off in his hands. "Fix this door, won't you?"

It's all lists and logic – no rhyming, no mug tricks, no powdered sugar to top it all off. The oven dings but Klaus makes no move to check on it. "Is everything just business to you?"

"Family business, Niklaus." And Elijah looks  _tired_. "It's the worst kind."

After that, Klaus goes through the motions, mechanically serving and automatically smiling – thrusting bills and accepting cards. This is what Rebekah had wanted, wasn't it? Someone to smile and make light of affairs, someone to bake extra butter into the crusts without even being offended by their lack of faith in his judgement. If his regulars are surprised by his presence they don't show it; they just ask about Rebekah and he laughs, telling them it's her off day and that she's excited to start college soon.

It's all so trivial; he wonders why he doesn't hate it yet.

He's exhausted come closing time, and there's still cleaning up to do. When he's stacking dishes, he catches sight of the sheaf of paper on his dusty work counter. Elijah, all-knowing Elijah, ever dependable Elijah, very much predictable Elijah, had already alphabetized the job applications that Klaus has to go through.

Klaus shuffles through them, crumples them up in his fist and sticks them in the oven. He's satisfied watching them curl up and burn.

 

 

He is working the tables once more and it's day three of his quest for Camelot, Camelot being the I Don't Need Anybody's Help show and its sequel, What Do You Mean This Wasn't What You Fuckin' Ordered?, and the unrated, much anticipated novel adaptation, Kiss My Ass You Lousy Tippers.

Klaus is elbow deep in pie crust and the orders are getting mixed up in his head, and he very nearly spears Logan Fell's arm when he dares grab a slice because Klaus is taking too long.

"Next time," Klaus snarls, "I'm putting this fork through your heart."

Elijah can count on Klaus being hospitable as much as he can count Klaus' streak of never once burning a pie, ever – infinitely.

Besides, Klaus has bigger fish to fry (and more pies to bake) than a few unhappy customers. There's no one managing the till, no one to convince Professor Saltzman that his waistline  _isn't_  expanding and an extra slice of butter pecan would surely do no harm, no one to guilt-stare people into leaving more than a quarter in the tip jar.

It was, as Elijah would put it, bad for the books.

And then a child cries, and Klaus doesn't know how to tell its mother that he's seriously considering banning children from his establishment.

He buries his head in his arms, right there amidst the desperate wailings of stupid children, on the curved counter in the middle of his diner in full view of the patrons waiting in their booths, banging on the tables demanding their pies.

This is why he needs Rebekah.

Someone taps on his shoulder. He looks up, and it's one of the Salvatore brothers. The older one, the token wisecracking leather-wearing takes-way-too-long-to-decide-what-he-wants brat. He grimaces; he'd always preferred Stefan.

"Hey, where's my cobbler?" Damon squints at him. "Anyway, are you okay?"

"No," Klaus barks as he whips his towel over his shoulder, "I bake pies, not serve them."

He stalks back in his kitchen, paces and prowls, does an Elijah and lists down every inconceivable idea on every reason why he  _shouldn't_ , but ends up picking up the phone to call his sister anyway.

 

 

Christmas Day.

Rebekah barely has enough time to adorn the Pie Hole with twinkling lights and streamers, to frost the windows and string silver snowflakes, and to hang up stockings by the espresso machine before swept up with the demands of parties and double-booked pastries. She even hangs mistletoe from the arch of their doorway out of spite, remembering how her brother hated couple being intimate, couples, and just being intimate in general.

The smirk on her face is a magnificent one whenever people passing by the shop are greeted to the view of Tyler Lockwood sneaking a quick one on Elena Gilbert or Damon Salvatore all but pressing Bonnie Bennett into the door in the urgency of their kiss.

But mostly Rebekah tiptoes around Klaus, a reminder that while she is willing to grant forgiveness over most things, she's not likely to forget.

Klaus thinks what a nuisance this is as he bakes ten lemon meringue pies for Mayor Lockwood, who'd cajoled him into doing the catering at her annual Christmas party despite him sending a neatly-worded reply that he simply

Does

Not

Do

Parties.

She sends back a letter,  _From the desk of Mayor Lockwood_ , oh dear Klaus, I wonder who talked Pastor Remy into choosing a different landmark for his church so as to make room for your lovely little diner? Think of the children.

Klaus pens back his reluctant agreement.

All she does is send him a check in advance, and if it weren't for the fact that it soothed his conscience and Elijah's worry that they were behind on the numbers, he would've told her to eat it.

Rebekah finds one of his letters on the counter, notes the slants of his enraged penmanship and reminds him that it was  _his_  bright idea to open a diner in the first place; he better damn well act like it.

Klaus bares his teeth, tells  _her_  to eat it, but all she does is give him a sickeningly sweet smile before saying, "Or what, you'll stick a fork in my chest?"

He stares at her, wondering.

"Word travels fast, Nik." Rebekah rolls her eyes, but the anxiety in the set of her brows betrays her. "You don't want to start losing customers, do you?"

No, he concedes, rubbing his chin. He supposed not.

Which is how he ends up in a corner of Mayor Lockwood's grandiose living room, artfully arranging pies in silver dishes that gleamed under the golden chandeliers.

"Oh Klaus," Mayor Lockwood gushes, "this looks lovely." She quite tactfully moves the cream dish just a little to the left.

Klaus feels his eye begin to twitch.

Rebekah sweeps into the corner before, flashes a charming smile to Mayor Lockwood and quickly leads her away. As she's going she hisses to Klaus, " _We should have left you at the diner_."

Too late now, Klaus glowers. They'd left the Pie Hole in the care of Hayley, the temp who sometimes came to cover the weekends when Rebekah decided that she simply had to watch that new movie about those three guys who get smashed and always seem to leave their fourth friend behind in uncouth places. She's of the gum-cracking variety, part of the youth movement that had grown up with wry punch lines and drawling sarcastic jokes meant only for the sarcastic drawler to understand.

To say that Klaus doesn't understand would be an understatement, but Elijah had gotten someone to steal his favourite rolling pin and hide it in different places, so he has no choice but to hire her.

"As a trial," he makes sure she knows.

Hayley just shoots him a (sarcastic) smile and points him out the door.

 

 

The party is in full swing by the time 7pm rolls around, a phrase here which means Tyler Lockwood somehow got his head stuck between the banisters of the staircase, Steven Forbes had gone through four flutes of champagne, and Professor Saltzman had finally mustered up the courage to look Meredith Fell in the eye. Mistletoes were grabbed from doorways and held above objects of their affections, classical music wafted gaily through the vast rooms, there was dancing, singing, the toasting of champagne, and other wonderful sights to behold.

Rebekah drinks it all in, giggles when a boy asks her to dance despite the logo on the back of her shirt. She seemed to forget that she is on a job altogether, only going to check on the pies in the kitchen when she feels like she absolutely needs to.

Klaus is replenishing the lemon meringue and triple berry when he spots a familiar face in the mass of slow-dancing couples – the angular jaw, the dark hair swept back.  _Elijah_ , he thinks with astonishment, before remembering that Elijah was on a business trip in Versailles, something to do with Marcel. Besides, Elijah would never just drop into parties like these; he was much too busy for that even without the holidays.

Kol looks eerily like Elijah frozen in time; his chest constricts when Kol flashes him a cheeky smile – Klaus blinks and suddenly Kol's gone. He feels his hand tighten on a pie server almost on reflex and follows Kol into the crowd.

He finds his brother upstairs, surveying the party from the shadows. His hands rest lightly on the smooth wooden balustrades and he looks so at ease to be surrounded by the grand tapestries and oiled antique furniture that Klaus suspects that this is not his first time being here.

"If you wanted to hurt me, you should have grabbed something more wooden," Kol says without turning around. "Like a toothpick, or your butter pecan pie. It's a little dry."

Affronted, Klaus wants to slide the silver pie server right between his brother's ribs, but opts out when he sees the invitation sticking out of Kol's pocket. Sighing, he joins his brother at the balustrade. "Mayor Lockwood really wants everyone in one place, doesn't she?"

"Well it is Christmas," Kol says, as though Klaus needs reminding. "More than what I can say about my own family."

Klaus puts his weight on his hands, leans down on the smooth mahogany; allows himself to breathe. "You'd best leave. Rebekah won't be too happy to see you."

"But you see, brother…" Kol fishes a card out of his pocket. It's glittery and pink, with hearts printed on it. "I came to apologize. Couldn't find one that said "sorry I killed your boyfriend", so I chose a Valentine's themed one instead. Gave me an excuse to buy chocolates as well."

Klaus looks at his brother for a very long time. He still looks young, not yet twenty, his cheeks not even hollowed the way Elijah's is. Kol looks as though the dew is still upon him, fresh and clean in the winter air, like nothing could rip it away. But there's an emptiness in his eyes, the sort of sadness reserved for soldiers back from war, the sort of silence that you feel on nights when you cannot sleep but just stare at your ceiling.

Klaus sees his own eyes reflecting back at him and has to turn away.

Kol rests a hand on his shoulder. "You look tired, Nik."

"I'm just getting old." And he can feel it, in his bones, the weight of the world crashing down on him. He wants to wrap his arms around it, crush it right back, but he's afraid to  _touch_. "It's quite annoying."

"I suppose I would know how that feels," Kol says, "if you hadn't let me die."

Klaus shuts his eyes then, the weight almost crippling. "Kol—"

"The poison's still in me. I can't get it out." Kol glances down at the party below them, looking grim. "Every single one of those people down there is a meal. I  _hunger_  for them; my teeth hum just looking at their throats. I crave nothing else. Which is a shame, really. I do miss your triple berry pie."

"I didn't mean—"

"You didn't mean to, you didn't know the extent of your powers, you were afraid, blah blah blah," Kol intones, already bored. "And now I have to watch my younger brothers grow older than me and compel people to forget my real age. And what do you do? Pour your angst into pies."

Despair is not something he's unfamiliar with, but he's always been good at hiding it – all of a sudden he's eight years old again, baking pie after pie after pie, flour dusting his cheeks made worse by his hand that keeps trying to brush them away, the way Kol's looking at him.

"I was eight," Klaus reminds him, vexed.

Kol snorts. "Yeah, well, I'm supposed to be thirty-nine. How's that for perspective?" After a while, he sighs. His apology is stiff, but it's one anyway, and Klaus knows they don't come at just any expense. "Look, I'm… sorry. You were a kid. But you could have just gone for it."

 _It wasn't hard_ , Kol's eyes seem to say. Just a touch, one touch, and it would have been so much different.

All at once, it's just too much. He's sick of standing down, sick of the gnarled nails pointed at his direction; he brings the sharp end of pie server down on the balustrade, a sharp stab, and it stands there vibrating. "What about the company you kept, then? The venom in your system that made you who you are today? We're not going to talk about that, about your little trips to Professor Maxfield's?"

"That's none of your concern," Kol says. His eyes flash; his voice seeps acid. "He stopped being one, after I snapped his neck. We're not so different, you and I. We grant lives as easily as we take them."

Years ago, Klaus would have scoffed at this, turned his back and walked away,  _you're delusional_. But now… now, he's not so sure. He looks at Kol's hands and sometimes they drip red, but were they any different than his own? He thinks of Rebekah, of the furious tilt of her lips,  _It's not the first time you've let someone live_ , but it also meant that it wasn't the first time he'd let someone die. It's all a frenzy in his mind and he wants to bring a fist to his temple, knock some clarity into his head. But Kol's still there, staring at him with an expression devoid of emotion.

Klaus knows better.

"I'm going to check on the pies," he tells Kol starchily and heads for the stairs. He shoulders his way through the crowd, on more than one occasion almost walking into a faceful of pie – were people seriously dancing and eating at the same time? – checks on the dessert table before finally making it to the kitchen.

There's someone in the kitchen tending over his pies, but it's not Rebekah.

"You're not Rebekah," he tells the man bent over the banana custard. The dropper in his hand stills.

"You've good observation," the man responds, before leaping over the table and the pies straight for Klaus.

Had Rebekah actually been there, she would have rated their crash to the ground a 6, the way Klaus' elbow hits the man's neck a 7, and the right hook Klaus receives a 7.5. Had Rebekah actually been there to watch over the pies, maybe Klaus wouldn't be trying to knee the man's groin, and maybe the man wouldn't be trying to claw Klaus' eyes out with his caramel-stained fingers.

Klaus gathers a fistful of the man's shirt and swings him into the stainless steel fridge with as much force as he can muster; the pounding in his head doesn't help much. The man groans and Klaus keeps his foot down on his back, and tries to catching his breath. Wiping his bloody lip with the back of his hand, Klaus realizes he's a little dazed—but not too dazed to the point where he can't recognize the donut insignia on the man's collar, and the dose of Ipicac he'd dripped into his pies.

With newfound strength, he heaves the man to his feet and slams his back against the wall. "Who are you?" he hisses, but the man just blinks at him, wincing. "Did Mikael send you?"

"You're going to have to kill me," he grins, blood colouring his teeth.

Bloodlust hums in his veins, and Klaus, almost spitting in his fury, just might. He snarls when he's angry, dangerously quiet when he's on to something – mother had always called him her wolf. My little wolf, she'd say fondly and ruffle his hair. What trouble comes knocking today?

The world held as much mystery as it did his mother's rounded belly, and he would press his ears to it, his mother coaxing him, coddling him,  _listen to your sister breathe_.

Just breathe, Niklaus. Breathe along with your sister.

And he does, in and out, in and out. When he's calmer (or as calm as a man is after he's found that his pies had been spiked with poison), Klaus shoves the man one last time for good measure, sneers, "A little melodramatic, don't you think?" but lets him go.

Which is a stupid move on his part, because the man produces a knife, and Klaus barely registers the sharp flash of silver before it's lodged in his side. Blinded with pain, he staggers back, presses a hand down on his abdomen. His palm is printed in red on his white shirt and along the wall as he struggles to get away, and he can see it all: this is Klaus Mikaelson, and this is how he dies. Can't bring yourself back to life when you yourself are dead, can you?

This is Klaus, and this is how he goes.

In the kitchen of the Lockwood Manor, covered in pie crust.

It's such a ridiculous notion he might laugh, but the pain keeps his teeth gritted together. The man advances, bloodied knife still in hand, bloodied teeth still bared at him, but then his neck twists in an odd way – Klaus hears a snap and suddenly he's lying in a heap on the marble floor, Kol standing above him.

"Who's Donut Guy here?" Kol prods the dead man's side with the toe of his shoe.

"Well, we'll never know now, can we?" Klaus coughs, and the front of his shirt is lightly sprayed with his blood and spit.

He can practically hear Kol rolling his eyes as he crouches down. "Who knew on the brink of death, that you'd be so stupid? Touch him."

"I don't—" It's an effort to sit up, even more of an effort to shake his head. The kitchen is starting to sway around him, and the only clear thing he sees are his brother's dark eyes peering at him through the stark white. "Can't. Too tired."

The light is too bright in his eyes.

He wants to tell his sister he's sorry. He's dying, and he's sorry. He wants to walk her home from school again, take her through shady alleyways like he used to, the brave older brother who isn't afraid of a man with a knife (but look at him now). She's guiding him now, pulling and tugging at his hand even as he's saying, "Rebekah—leave it, no darling, we should be on our way now—"

His sister's little blonde head fills his vision, but suddenly it's a different blonde, so young and so still, lying in that little alleyway—

"Leave it," he whispers, pupils dilating, "Leave it alone."

He can't hear Kol's response over how loud his breathing is in his ears, but suddenly his mouth is filled with the metallic taste of blood – warm blood, heady blood, blood that isn't his. He almost chokes, wants to wrench his head away, but Kol's wrist is firmly pressed to his lips.

"Relax, would you?" Kol snaps. "I'm trying to heal you."

"What's going on here?"

Rebekah.

Now's his chance—

A clatter of heels against marble and suddenly she's kneeling down by his side, hands on his chest as he fights, holding him down. What are you doing? he wants to ask, but he's too weak. I don't want this poison in my system, get him away from me—Rebekah's hands push him down harder.

"Stay still," she grits. Her cheeks are still pink from dancing, her hair looks a bit windswept. "Stay down Nik, or so help me God I will kill you myself."

Wheezing, Klaus slumps back against the cabinets, tearing his shirt from where it's tucked under his trousers as he feels the torn flesh in his stomach mend itself. He takes in great lungfuls of air as his head clears and his vision stops flitting in and out, searching for his brother – but Kol's already gone. He breathes a laugh through his nose. So much for Valentine's cards.

Rebekah gingerly picks up the discarder dropper off the floor and sniffs at it. "It smells like…"

"Ipicac," Klaus says. The sweat is cooling on his skin and his pulse is racing, but he manages to find his feet. His legs are shaking; he grabs the counter to steady himself and waves Rebekah's hand away. "Makes you vomit. A lot."

The man on the floor is young, barely older than Kol had been the day he died. He smells faintly of powdered sugar as Klaus bends down over him. His hand hovers in mid-air, but hearing Rebekah's impatient click of her tongue makes him reach down and touch him.

He immediately sits up and Klaus backs away, already pushing back his sleeve to check on the time. "Alright, first thing's first: you're dead."

The man groans. "Mikael said this would happen."

Klaus exchanges a look with Rebekah over his shoulder. "What's your name?"

"General None of Your Beeswax," he shoots, surveying them with disdain.

"Be nice, General," Klaus wags a finger in his face, "or I'll touch you again. Now tell me why Mikael sent you, other than wanting to sabotage this dinner party."

General's eyes are crossed as he stares at Klaus' finger, and Klaus can see sweat start to collect in the man's temples. He's going to break, Klaus thinks triumphantly. General is going to tell him  _everything_ , and he'll finally have something on his father, finally be able to wipe that smug grin off his face whenever he swung by the diner to run a gloved finger down the mantelpiece or pick at the crusts of his pie.

Wolfish in his feat, Klaus leans closer and bears down on him a frightening grin, and he almost forgets to check his wristwatch. He flicks his eyes away for a third of a second—then Rebekah's gasping, jostling his arm. He whips his head around and sees a blonde in bright floral prints rooted at her spot in the doorway, her hand still twisted around the doorknob.

"I—" she waves her empty glass uselessly, "I can come back."

It takes only a second.

Klaus doesn't even have the time to ask her what she's seen – judging from the look in her eyes it was  _everything_  – doesn't even have time to convince her it's all one really twisted Christmas prank when General None of Your Beeswax's boot is kicked into his chest and he bangs against a table leg, winded. Rebekah's pushed to the floor, too shocked to even scream, and suddenly cold wind is blowing into the room as the back door swings on its hinges. Klaus scrambles to his feet, fingers clawing at the air where, moments before, the hem of the General's shirt was billowing in his wake.

The Lockwood's lawn is vast and dark, and the General is already lost to it.

"Shit," Klaus curses, and turns back to the doorway—as his luck would have it, the blonde is gone as well. He brings his fist down on the table. " _Fuck."_

"Nik." Rebekah's eyes are wide, fearful, but there's a hint of wonder in them, and nope, Klaus won't have it, Klaus  _can't_  have it—he turns away.

The kitchen is too bright, too white, and he yearns for the monochrome of his diner, of the warm glows and nostalgic accents. His freshly-healed wound tingles and he traces a finger on it, knowing full well that Rebekah is aware of how he's standing steady on his feet when only mere minutes ago he had been lying in a pool of his own blood. He presses down, wondering why Rebekah hasn't brought it up yet.

He busies himself with the cabinets, opening and closing, rooting around until he finds a bottle of Bailey's as Rebekah puts a hand to her forehead, pushes her hair back. She looks ashen. "The girl… I recognized her."

"You should. You saved her." Klaus finds a crystal glass, plops it down on the table with a clatter. He checks his wristwatch again.

59 seconds.

Here we go.

He fills it to the brim with whiskey and downs it in one go. The inferno burning down his throat and coursing through his blood is a welcome feeling, and he reaches for the bottle again. He needs another drink before the screaming starts.


	2. park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor (dream about me)

Professor Saltzman is a mess.

He's giving a lecture on the crisis of the third century and diocletianic reforms when suddenly his shoulders are heaving and his nose is wheezing and Melissa Harp from the first row has to pass him a Kleenex.

"It's clean," she assures him, despite it being crumpled and dug from the recesses of her pockets. To Caroline, she whispers, "It's practically a relic. I've had these jeans since freshman year."

Caroline glances down at her notebook and sighs. Her slanted script have hardly filled a page – Professor Saltzman had mumbled through ten minutes of barbarian invasions, and his diatribe on the ruin of the local elite had been forced at best with stammers and jerks in between, when finally, he'd collapsed on his table crying out some woman's name.

Like, right in the middle of his European History class.

It was all really sad.

But Professor Saltzman's breakdown, Melissa Harp tells her, has been a long time coming.

Caroline half-listens as she stows her notebook and pen back into her bag. Melissa Harp tells her that since she's new, she's probably going to think it's a little weird (it's a lot weird) but she's just going to have to get used to it. Melissa Harp tells her that he can't help it.

"He has a fragile soul," Melissa Harp insists. "He's _sensitive_."

"What a stud," Caroline replies agreeably as they step out of the lecture hall and head for the stairs. She's shivering – the vents in this place went on and on for miles, and the people who were supposed to come and repair the heaters probably got lost in there. Kind of like those poor whales that get disoriented and, like, beach themselves. That mouldy bologna smell wafting through the vents in the cafeteria is probably them.

She tells Melissa Harp this, but all Melissa does is wrinkle her nose, _gross_.

Whatever. She'd had a weird weekend, okay?

It's warmer in the main hall, where students mill around the notice board and huddle together for warmth. The stone flooring is so old they it's speckled and grooved in places, eroded by centuries' worth of footsteps from people coming and going.

The walls are smooth varnished wood that reflect the light streaming in from the windows: it's a pleasant winter day, snowflakes just beginning to settle on the trees. The whole college is just buzzing with post-holiday jitters, which Caroline finds uplifting and even a little charming, when a boy thrusts a cracker at her in passing and she tugs at it to produce a loud bang and a paper hat.

When she steps outside, her footsteps sink three inches and leave little holes on the ground, and she looks down at them with a quiet satisfaction, all thoughts of her manicure chipping away in the cold forgotten.

It never snowed in Virginia.

Here, there's plenty of it sticking to the soles of her boots and the folded cuffs of her jacket. She thinks she'll collect them; tiny little snowflakes in the lines of her jacket and in the curls of her hair, shake them off in her room and watch them melt in her shag carpet.

Melissa's still talking, and Caroline feels a twinge of guilt – stand taller, walk faster. Chin up, laugh a bit – _Pay attention, Caroline_ , Professor Hawke always used to say.

"…still so heartbroken over Dr. Fell, _oh_ she was so gorgeous, wish I had her hair…"

Hair. Pretty girls. She can do this, she was the queen of all the pretty girls, anyway, isn't that what Dad says? Caroline smiles at Melissa: encouraging, friendly.

Melissa Harp blows out a yearning sigh, a white trail. "It's so sad, like all he used to do was sit around in this diner and like, pine after her. And now she's dead. Just fell down in the middle of a party, like a heart attack or something. Sad, right? I mean, how tragic is th… hey, you gonna keep up or what?"

Caroline, without realizing, had stopped in her tracks. "Did you say diner?"

"Uh." Melissa cocks her head. "Yeah?"

Caroline rushes up to her, hands gripped tight on her new friend's shoulder. "The… same diner that did the catering for Mayor Lockwood's party last week?"

"Yeah, I guess, just – personal space much?" Melissa wriggles away. "You were there?"

"My dad was invited," Caroline says absently. "I came with him."

Melissa continues walking, kicking at the odd dried leaf, a pinecone. She drags lines into the cobblestones with the shuffling of her boots. "I would've gone I guess, if it weren't for the sick blowout at Vicki's. You know her, right? Vicki Donovan? Poor girl, she just lost her brother. He was around our age, apparently he, like, _fell_ while cleaning or something. What a way to go, right? Vicki should so sue the Pie Hole, that's what I think, but we love them too much and besides, it's such a hassle—"

"The Pie Hole, was it called?" Caroline interrupts, scrabbling for a pen, God, she needs to write this down or something. "Which street?"

"Corner of Maple and Vine, but – hey! Where are you going?"

The words "pie binge!" are barely out of her mouth before she's running, the tassels of her snow hat flying behind her. She can hear Melissa Harp's voice getting fainter and fainter as she skips over frozen puddles and dodges dog walkers and cat walkers alike. She had just one thought on her mind, and that was to get to the diner, yes, get to the diner, push open the door and, and – well, she'll figure out the rest later.

This town becomes a blur of purple doors and flower pots and snow-dusted front steps as she runs. She bumps into fewer people the deeper into town she gets, and really, she should have slowed down, looked around, maybe ask for directions, but always determined to do things on her own, she is – until finally she's all alone in the street.

Her jog slows into a skip into a stroll and she groans, because of _course_ she'd taken a wrong turning. Maple and Vine, she'd scrawled in the bit of paper she now clutches in her hand. Looking around the deserted streets and boarded-up windows, this was so not it.

She walks around anyway, something about the scraped-up walls and dusty pavements pulling her in. She stops short in front of an alleyway, pulls a hand down its red-bricked walls, and something clicks into place in her mind.

It was here, wasn't it? She'd been mugged here once.

As absent-minded then as she is now, she'd taken a wrong turning on the way home from – somewhere. The post office maybe, to send grandma a postcard. Dad had let her out on her own ( _just don't tell your mother_ ) she'd felt so tall walking down the street in her yellow galoshes, her hand wrapped firmly around her stamp-money.

Caroline steps further into the alley. She'd been eight, maybe nine, and she'd lost her favourite necklace that day: the silver prancing horse she'd gotten for a birthday she hardly remembers. She counts the bricks on one wall, wondering what else these walls have seen, what other misfortune that cost other people a knock on the head as strong as the one she'd gotten.

Hit her right in the head, like – what an asshole.

She doesn't remember telling Dad about it. Maybe it was the fall, the shock of her head hitting gravel and then wham, nothing. If not she would have told him about the girl who'd held her hand out when she came to, of the elder brother, much much much older than the two of them, fidgeting from being in such a shady area of town.

"You hit your head and fell," she said.

"You scraped your knee, too," she said.

She reached for Caroline's hand. "Do you wanna walk home with me?"

And she'd peered down at Caroline with eyes as blue as her own and asked if she wanted to be friends. They walked ahead of the girl's brother, who kept his hands in his pockets as the rain started falling in sheets of blue and grey around them. Caroline went straight to bed after that, her head a little woozy. That winter was probably the last time she had visited Dad; Mom finds out about her necklace and is furious, even more so when Caroline had just shrugs when asked how she lost it.

Her sharp Sheriff eyes train over her pale cheeks, her trembling hands. "Let me see your head."

A phone call. An argument.

A terrible one too, judging by the shouting and brandishing of hands and the banging of doors even though Daddy was a million miles away, probably doing the same thing.

A bump on the head and suddenly Caroline doesn't see Daddy for ten years.

Ten long winters without his dry roast chicken and mushy carrots, his winsome smiles and toothpaste breath, without his big warm hand around hers when they walk around the labyrinth roads of this new town he'd decided to call home, this place with its winding turrets and peeling shutters and horse-voiced pageboy who still bellowed the day's news every morning and every night.

Gawd, it's the 21st century, she wants to tell them. Ever heard of free wifi? Online newsletters? _Central heating?_

Ten years away and nothing much has changed, not these empty alleyways with its crumbling corners and masonry that reached the sky. A knock on the head and suddenly Caroline sees everything – the girl with yellow pigtails who'd just wanted a friend; the boy whose hands he kept hidden away in his pockets like he had whole universes within his palms.

But somehow – _somehow_ —

She closes her eyes, rubs at them with her cold fingers. It was that damn dinner party. Mayor Lockwood's dazzling Crest white strips smile, the strawberries floating in the champagne. There's more she's not remembering, and then there are things she tries to forget, but can't.

The facts were these: The man had been dead, she knows, she's _sure_ , but one touch and suddenly he's whooping ass and kicking down doors. The boy who touched him was a man grown now, with blood sopping down his shirt and fury bared in his teeth.

The girl standing in the doorway was the girl lying in a puddle in the alleyway, and this girl sees this spectacle unfold before her (this girl sees a man come back to life), and this girl—

She runs.

The facts were these: Champagne is scandalously ignored, Tyler's head is still stuck between the bannisters and he calls out for help, but she totally disregards him; just grabs her coat from the coat check girl and all but flings herself out the front door, _peace out_.

The facts were these: With the wind biting at her knees and her breath blowing up great plumes of white about her face she runs, she runs and doesn't stop, not for the stitch screaming in her side, not for her breath that's starting to come up in pants and wheezes.

It's a little after midnight when her phone starts blowing up with concerned pseudo-angry texts from Dad that she finally slows to a stop, red to her ears, the hem of her coat damp with mud. She's fidgety, restless; her hands won't stop shaking, so she shoves them in her pockets, scrapes her nails into her palms.

It's ridiculous, she thinks, her first day back and this damn town's already started to make up for lost time.

It's ridiculous, she thinks, all this running.

"It's ridiculous!" she cries into the night.

The stars shiver and the naked trees scratch at the wind, but they give no sign of having heard her. It's ridiculous, it's insane, it's witchcraft, it's whatever the hell she wants to call it, because she's pretty sure there have been no recorded incident of the scene she'd just witnessed back there in that white kitchen – not in life, not ever.

She doesn't know how long she stands in that alleyway, fingers digging into red clay brick, snow falling around her cheeks in light touches, cold caresses. She's vaguely aware of how… _dramatic_ it all is, like those gaudy K-dramas Davina makes her watch.

Her phone bleats out her dad's ringtone and she clicks the green button, glad for the distraction.

Dad's voice fills her ear, warm and gruff all at the same time. "You on your way home yet?"

"Pretty much," Caroline says, obediently turning her feet to the right direction.

"Great. I made lasagna—hey, what are you… get your fork out of there!" There's a shuffling, some muffled laughter in the background. "Steven wants me to tell you it's some delicious lasagna. I'll try holding him off, Carebear, but I can't promise it won't all be finished by the time you get home."

"I'll run," she promises.

She stuffs the bit of address on that bit of paper in the back pocket of her jeans. Tomorrow, then.

 

 

 

Steven Forbes (née Langdon) insists on setting the mood for every occasion in life, be it incense in the bathrooms, bringing an actual food truck to all his step-daughter's meets, and the ever timeless lighting of candles during dinnertime. Usually, his antics are met with exasperated sighs or the humiliated hiding-of-face behind pompoms, and sometimes Steven wonders idly if he's overstepped some line as he sneaks into Caroline's school gym in the middle of the night (after a secretly-booked flight ticket to Virginia to avoid Bill's judgmental gaze), fixing lighters and adjusting the Swarovski, not that he doesn't trust his step-daughter's taste in style, but _oh_ honey, this stage could do with one more smoke machine.

The look on her face as she steps up in her beautiful white gown wipes any doubt in his mind, and he gives himself a little pat on the back from up in the rafters where's he's perched, hidden from sight, and adjusts his utility belt. Line? _What line_?

Steven surveys Caroline affectionately over his glass of red wine. At the head of the table, Bill frowns down at the day's newspaper, the screen of his phone shedding light on the small print. Every now and then he'd cast an annoyed but affectionate look at Steven, who had set the rules: lights switched _off_ during dinner.

Bill casts the newspaper aside with a sigh. So much for reading about Dr. Fell's post-mortem. "How was school today, Caroline?"

"It was good," Caroline ventures, spearing a cherry tomato. "Professor Saltzman had a nervous breakdown, I found out Vicki Donovan had a brother who just died, there may or may not be a dead repairman in the vents of the cafeteria. And – oh! I learned about the diocletanic's reforms."

"Lovely," Steven claps.

Done with her meal, Caroline gets up to wash her plate. With her hand gripping her sponge she asks, oh so casually, "Dad?"

"Yeah?" both Steven and Bill pipe up – one airy and the other brusque.

Caroline smiles down at the soapy suds. "The dad who's stayed here longer."

"That would be me." Steven pushes his chair back and plunks the empty casserole dish next to the sink. "What's up?"

"How long has the Pie Hole been here?"

Steven frowns, thinking. "Not that long."

Huh. Caroline scrubs a little harder. "What about the person that owns it, then?"

"The Mikaelsons?" Bill says, twisting in his seat. "Why would you want to know about them? And be careful with that - you're scraping the Teflon off."

There's a gleeful grin on Steven's face as he leans in and jabs her side with his spoon. "Got a little crush, Carebear?"

A crush? As _if_. The notion's so absurd she grips her sponge tighter, spilling soap suds into her palm. " _No_ ," she says, bristling, "it's just, you know, people are so in love with their pies and stuff."

"They're some British family who moved here way back when," Steven says, waving it off. "Elijah's the one who really runs it; Klaus just bakes the pies."

"Klaus," Caroline echoes quietly, even as the word _British_ resounds inside her. She feels her cheeks warm, and – _urgh_ , _Care_ , can you not be so shallow right now? So what if some hanky panky guy who happened to bring a dead person back to life had an accent? He was still some hanky panky guy _who happened to bring a dead person back to life._

Bill shakes his head. "They're constantly at war with the donut shop across the street. These people with their family businesses' taking everything so _personally_ – it's some deranged mafia diner, let me tell you."

"But they make good pie," Steven discounts through a mouthful of leftover cheese. " _And_ they have nice faces. Especially the grumpy one."

While Bill just throws his hands up all _oy vey,_ he's used to it, Caroline pushes away from the sink—nope, so not here for this. "I'm going to bed."

"It's 8:20," Steven says, raising an eyebrow.

"Just play _along_ ," Caroline calls as she runs up the stairs. Her head's swimming.

 

 

 

Tomorrow—

Caroline passes by Professor Saltzman in the hallway, and he's wearing green tweed and an orange tie, loose around his neck. He looks drawn, his lips are bloodless, and there's an air of something forlorn about him. He's probably going to end up in the college's _Herald_ , Voted Most Likely to Have Nervous Breakdown Twice in a Row or something.

Poor thing.

Melissa Harp falls in step with Caroline as she's making her way across the courtyard. The air is rife with the smell of hot chocolate, floral perfume, library books, and stale cheese as students sneak alcohol into aforesaid hot chocolate on school premises to abate the neurosis side effects that came with having double sessions of Astrophysics with Professor Mahmood.

"Could've waited for me yesterday, you bitch," Melissa grumbles. She's fumbling with the tail of her braid – she has a shock of black hair that always seemed to get tangled up in cold weather. "I'm always down for pie. Especially the Mikaelsons'. Their Sweet Potato? Imagine an orgasm but like…" she trails off, fingers telling a story her lips haven't finished, grappling for the right word.

"On your tongue?" Caroline guesses.

"Yes!" Melissa looks at her appraisingly. "You _get_ it. Anyway, I gotta jet. See you tomorrow."

Caroline waves a goodbye and makes her way down the street, slow paces this time, glaring at every street sign to make sure she's on the right one. Last night, she'd painstakingly tapped the address into Google Maps, even dragged the little orange man onto the screen. She's practically memorized every speckle bricked into the walls, every crack in the cobblestone, every tree that lined the corners.

She walks up Maple Grove, eyes raking over the display windows with bated breath, and when she spots Vine Street her breath catches in her throat so sharply she almost passes out. Right there, in the pile of crunchy brown leaves.

For a moment she's eight years old again, splashing into puddles in her yellow galoshes.

Her hands are shaking. She stuffs them into the warm pockets of her coat as she walks up to the circular diner with its large display windows and roof shaped like a pie crust. There's a snazzy neon sign that she swears she's seen in a movie somewhere, and she wonders how it'd look like lighting up the corners of this dark screen, all bright red and burning yellow.

This is it. This is what she's been crazy-obsessing over for a week now, and it's right there at the tips of her fingers, all tangy and delicious (and smothered with cream). She has to get this over with, one way or another.

Taking a deep breath, Caroline pushes open the door. A bell jingles and almond air flutters around her face, coaxing her to loosen the scarf wound tight around her neck. The place is so retro – she's talking checkered patterns, red lights mounted on the walls, black and white marble floors, a circular counter with an old-school mint-green-and-yellow till at the end of it. There's a girl with dark hair slouched behind the till, snapping on her gum.

"Welcome to the Pie Hole," she drawls. Caroline glances at her nametag: HI! I'M A TRAINEE AND MY NAME IS Hayley.

"I—" Caroline stops, flushing. She doesn't really know what to say, now that she's here. Which is weird, because she's Caroline _Forbes_ , she single-handedly threw the best prom Mystic Falls High had had in years, all by referring to a worn book she'd sketched her ideas into since she was in seventh grade.

Hayley gives her a bored once over. "You?"

"Pie," Caroline manages to chirp out, and fights the urge to screw her eyes shut, because _seriously_? Hayley doesn't hold it against her; all she does is shuffle to the pie display, grabs one from the bottom and sloppily cuts Caroline a piece.

Cracking her gum the whole way, Hayley gestures to a stool and slides the plate down the counter.

"I… haven't ordered yet," Caroline says to the warm slice of Banana Cream.

Hayley rolls her eyes. "Were you ever going to?"

Caroline blinks at her, privately just appalled, but she's got a point. She picks up her fork and takes a bite – and it's so good her eyes like, legit close, and she may or may not have let out an appreciative moan.

"I think this is the only part I like about this job," she hears Hayley say. "That shitfaced 'I just orgasmed' look you're rocking."

A little embarrassed, Caroline tucks a curl behind her ear. "Um, is Klaus in today? He makes the pies, right?"

"Actually—" Hayley pauses and actually brings herself to her full height. "No. He went out to lunch."

Caroline's eyebrows furrow. "He went out to lunch, during lunch rush hour… at his own diner?" Seriously? "When will he be back?"

"Um." Hayley inspects a nail. "In a jiffy."

Caroline's not exactly sure how long a jiffy's meant to be (not too long, she hopes – Dad wants her back by dinner). A jiffy shouldn't be too long, right? Especially not for the girl who's had Steven set a timer every time she brushed her teeth, to ensure 'adequate and thorough brushing'. She flashes her pearly whites at Hayley, fully prepared to wait. "By the way, why is there duct tape holding up the door handle?"

"Don't question the man," Hayley says it with the straightest face Caroline's ever seen on a person. "If you ask me, the whole family's a little…" she whistles, points her finger at her temple in circles.

Caroline chews on this, and then forks more pie into her mouth so she can chew on that too. "But they make good pie."

 

 

 

"You'll never believe it!" Rebekah breezes into the kitchen through the back door, looking utterly pissed off. She has a glossy photograph in one hand and a thick brown envelope in the other. "Tyler Lockwood has turned coat! Tyler Lockwood is a _traitor_."

Before Klaus can even utter a befuddled _What_?, Rebekah slaps the photograph down on flour-dusted table. It's a picture of their sometimes-delivery boy and son of the town Mayor, exiting the donut shop across the street.

"So?" Klaus asks, but he feels the sting. "Whatever preferences he has with his dessert has nothing to do wi—"

Rebekah clicks her tongue impatiently, _stupid brother_. "Nik, _look_ at his jacket."

Klaus studies the photo. Brown jacket with pink and green trimming and – wait a minute, he knows this jacket, knows how it scratches in the shoulders and how it's missing some buttons at the bottom. He knows this jacket so well he's surprised it wasn't the first thing he noticed.

"Filthy bastard," he declares vehemently. Tyler is wearing the crest of their _arch nemesis_. The sudden betrayal cuts so deep that Klaus savagely tears the circle of dough he's been trying to cover his Chocolate Cream pie filling with. He drops the dough and brushes his hands off on his trousers. There are more pictures in the envelope – Tyler walking down the street hauling several boxes, Tyler smiling at a customer as he delivers right to their doorstep, Tyler hunched into his jacket as he exits his snow-swathed delivery car.

The _nerve_ of the boy – sure, he only works part-time, coming in about the amount of times Hayley does, but to their competitors across the street? After everything they've _done_ for him? He snatches at the pictures. "How did you get these?"

"Elijah mailed them," Rebekah says simply. "You know how he always knows these things. So what are you going to do?"

Klaus scratches at his stubbly chin, marking it with flour and butter. "I'm going to send him a pie. Yep, Dutch Apple. That's his favourite, isn't it?"

Rebekah blinks owlishly at him. "Send him a pie? Really? He spits in the face of our family venture and you want to send him a gift on the way out?"

"Don't be silly, sister," Klaus mutters as he strides to the pantry. "It's going to be laced with Ipicac. The very thing those wanks tried to spike our pies with."

Rebekah smiles and follows him into the pantry, where he's rifling through the shelves for some cinnamon. "Won't he be suspicious, though?"

Klaus rolls his eyes. "He went to them as silent as a snake in the grass. Obviously he assumes we're still in the dark. You'll ask him over for dinner, serve him this pie – lay the guilt on thick."

The smile on his sister's face widens into something devilish, and they hear the front door jingling almost as if to accommodate it. "Wonderful. Or we could always feed the pie to Kol. Two birds, one stone and all that jazz."

Though tempting, Klaus has to banish the thought from his mind. As scheming and evil as their brother was, he _had_ saved his life not one week ago, even helped kill General None of Your Beeswax, but look where that led them…

The hand that's roving for the jar of cinnamon powder stills.

That girl, he should have stopped her. Instead, he'd waited in that blood-splattered kitchen, counting down the seconds until a person died in the General's place, and what a shame that it had to be Meredith Fell. She'd been an intellectual witty thing, her favourite had been coconut cream pie, and she always left good tips.

"One at a time, sister." His hand closes around the cinnamon and he turns to leave. "And if we don't have any Ipicac, maybe grab the rat pois… oh, bloody _hell—_ "

Klaus turns on his heels and almost collides into Rebekah in his haste to get back into the pantry. Rebekah, doubled over a barrel, hisses in pain. " _What_ is your problem?"

Klaus, breathing hard, has pressed his back flat against the door of the pantry. He tugs on his sister's arm and makes her peek through the door's little window.

Her face clouds over. "Oh."

 

 

 

"She's eating pie," Rebekah says with bated breath. "Shouldn't be long now."

Thirty minutes pass and Klaus' legs are starting to cramp from his position on the floor. The pantry isn't even that big to begin with, and with Rebekah taking up more leg room than a normal teenaged-girl should, he has to lean against the door with his feet up on one of the shelves across from him. Rebekah's knees stab into his face whenever she stands on tip toe to peek out the window.

"What's she doing now?" Klaus asks wearily another twenty minutes later, arranging some spice tins into a pyramid.

"Still eating pie." Another knee jab.

Klaus swats her knee away. "Is she a slow eater?"

"Very."

Klaus sighs, and starts on a castle.

 

 

 

"Sniff it."

"No."

"Come _on,_ Nik— _sniff it_."

Klaus groans and leans forward, eyes blindfolded by Tyler's old apron (which they'd taken great pleasure in tearing to pieces) and takes a cautious whiff. "Anise seed."

"Yay," Rebekah whisper-cheers, and Klaus can hear her move aside tins to grab another cannister. " _Rebekah_ , we've been at this for more than—"

"Sniff," Rebekah commands.

Why does he even bother? "Cardamom."

" _Wrong_ ," Rebekah sings. "It's ginger powder. Not bad though, that's seventy-three out of eighty. One more?"

Klaus just groans.

 

 

 

"Do you think," Rebekah asks, "if you'd touched Kol, he would've come back a vampire anyway? Because you'd have to die to turn into one, don't you? And technically he was already dead…"

Rebekah frowns deeply, mulling this over, confusing herself even more.

Klaus doesn't answer because he's not even sure he knows the answer. "Does this mean you've forgiven him?"

"He's our brother," Rebekah says, and Klaus wonders if it sounds as hollow in her ears as it does in his.

 

 

 

"Rebekah," Klaus pushes at his sister, "get off of me. My foot's asleep."

"This is stupid," Rebekah complains loudly, getting to her feet. Klaus instantly tugs her down, all the while furiously hissing _Shhh_. "We've been here for more than two hours and _I_ —" She pushes open the pantry door with a bang, "am going to say hi."

"Rebekah!" Klaus clambers to his feet as well, but his sister's already in the kitchen, and he shuts his eyes, _cursing_ himself for listening to Elijah's suggestion of having an open kitchen.

"So people can see you work," Elijah had said while drawing a big _X_ over the wide door in Klaus' designs. "So I don't have to keep dispelling those rumours that you slip razor blades in your pies."

"What do they take us for, some deranged mafia diner?" Klaus grumbled, but altered his blueprints anyway.

From her designated spot behind the till, Hayley just rolls her eyes and predictably cracks her gum. "You guys can come out now. She left like thirty minutes ago."

Klaus pokes his head out of the pantry, rubbing his sore calves. "Thanks for telling us sooner. So glad our misery seems to have amused you."

"Only _his_ misery. I had a grand time." Rebekah is regarding Hayley with an impressed look on her face. "How did you know not to tell her where he was?"

"For one," Hayley says while procuring a nail file out of thin air, "I've never seen her before; definitely new around here."

Klaus frowns, not following, but allows her to continue.

"For two," Hayley stresses, "she was a pretty girl. A nice girl. A pretty, _nice_ girl. A pretty, nice girl asking for Klaus. Doesn't that sound laughable to you?"

Apparently it does, to his sister, who's clutching her stomach from giggling. Klaus glowers at the both of them and goes to collect the dirty dishes from deserted tables that Hayley hadn't even bothered to clear. "You know, Hayley—"

The unruly look in his eyes stops Hayley's laughter, and she slouches a little behind the till.

"—if I weren't about to give you a bonus this month, I'd fire you," Klaus finishes. He sweeps into the kitchen and starts on the washing up. It's late in the evening and _not_ a Tuesday, so the flow of people is slower.

"That's as much of a 'thank you' you'll ever get," he hears his sister say.

It's the slowest day of the week, and he catches Hayley dozing on the countertop, _in plain view of their customers_ more than once; is about to flick her awake when he sees it, the stapled papers she's using as a padding for her head.

"Oi," he says, jostling her awake. "What's this?"

Hayley stretches, and gives a delicate yawn. She blinks a few times, pops a fresh piece of gum into her mouth before answering. "From pretty nice girl. She applied for a job."

Klaus feels his stomach drop to the floor, even hears a little _splat_ —but it's just that clumsy Josh staring forlornly at the remains of his pie on the floor. Rebekah's already on the way to clean it.

"Well, Hayley," Klaus says through gritted teeth, "why didn't you talk her out of it?"

"There's a HELP WANTED sign right there."

Klaus shoots her a look that can only be described as scathing, marches out the door, grabs the sign from where it hangs and flings it across the street.

(It hits Damon Salvatore in the face, and that is the story of how he gets to have free pie for an entire week.)

 

 

While all traces of the Girl (he's started capitalizing it in his mind) have been removed from the diner—her plate is scrubbed twice; Rebekah carelessly tosses the fork into a pile and Klaus spends hours polishing every single fork in the kitchen just to be sure; her application thrown out by a disgruntled Hayley without even a look over—it isn't as easy to banish her from his mind.

She's looking for him, clearly—

"Yeah," Kol snorts, "it's very apparent in the way she ordered a piece of pie and left as soon as she was finished with it. She very much wants you, Nik."

Rebekah steps into the kitchen with a load of dirty dishes and throws her brother an even dirtier look, but says, "For once I'm inclined to agree with him."

Elijah rustles his newspaper in their direction _, now now_ – play nice. Klaus looks around the kitchen in despair, how Kol's boots are resting on his freshly-scrubbed table and how Rebekah is totally disregarding the dishes and is now perched on the counter, doing her nails with the bottle of nail polish Hayley had left behind, smack dab in the middle of the pie display.

Probably on purpose, Klaus snarls inwardly, the brat.

Elijah finally sets down his newspaper. There are the beginnings of dark circles under his eyes; he'd came to the diner straight from the airport after Klaus had called to tell him that Rebekah and Kol were actually being amicable. And by amicable, he meant "not gouging each other's eyes out with forks" – but that was most likely because Klaus has been obsessively hoarding them.

It's been a while since all four of them were together like this. With the exception of Hayley packing up her things to go home for the day, it feels like those dinners they used to have together – before Elijah started taking the executive seat, before Rebekah started falling for boys with fragile hearts, before Kol realized he had a penchant for ripping out aforementioned boys' fragile hearts, and before Mikael kicked all of them out but – _details_.

"Still haven't fixed that door," Elijah murmurs, but it's so quiet that Klaus surmises he must be at it again, making lists in his head. Compartmentalizing everyone. Probably already drawn up graphs in his head complete with annotations on how Klaus, as head (and only) piemaker here could motivate Hayley to not take naps behind the till while people are queuing up to pay.

His whetstone grinds against his stainless steel knife with seasoned precision, the sharp gritty noise as soothing as the Enya Elijah sometimes puts on after closing time. He looks up from his sharpening to glance at Rebekah, who is now being accosted by Kol's brandishing of a wrinkled Valentine's day card. What is it about her, he wonders, that makes her so susceptible to his half-arsed apologies? That she would just welcome her brother into the diner with arms that were not quite open, but inviting either way, after Kol had killed her boyfriend – it grates on him. Grates on him, because he's quite sure he can never be that forgiving.

He does not feel, and he does not care, but every time he says this Rebekah insists that he must be lying. But doesn't she _realize_? Love and forgiveness, they go hand in hand, right into a dark pit that was weakness.

"So what is this business with the Girl?"

"What?" Klaus asks blearily.

"The Girl," Elijah enunciates slowly. "The one who saw you bring the… General back to life."

"Oh, yes. That." Klaus slides the knife back in its knife block, brushes the dust off his hands and straightens up. "Right. Listen up and listen well, brothers and sister. We are moving."

Rebekah stops shoving Kol's face. "Wait, what?"

"We. Are moving." Klaus reiterates. He grabs his favourite rolling pin and smacks it into the palm of his hand. "Rebekah, darling, you handle all our customers. Tell them not to worry, we're not disbanding – we're simply going _underground_. And Kol. You're fired."

Kol looks like he's just been force-fed a whole lemon. He sputters an "Excuse you?" while Rebekah mutters under her breath, "About bloody time."

"You're no longer our busboy. You have been demoted. You are now our delivery boy." Klaus stabs the map of the town hanging from their wall with the end of his rolling pin. "Delivering secret pies all over town to our loyal customers to let them know we are still at it. Inhabitants need not know where we're going. This will be fun. A venture. An adventure. A venture-adventure. Of Pie."

Elijah stops leaning on the table, gauging the scene with practiced silence. But Rebekah – oh, Rebekah slaps a palm to her forehead.

"You started not making sense about five sentences ago," Rebekah says. "Venture-adventure? Secret deliveries? Nik, untwist your unmentionables and _tell_ us what's going on."

Klaus bangs down his rolling pin like a gavel. "We've been found out! The Girl could be running around town sticking notices under people's doors, alerting people of the secret happenings of our diner, sharpening their pitchforks to thrust _straight_ through our skulls—"

"Macabre much?" The rolling pin had scuffed the precious worktable, but Klaus pays not an inch of a mind to it. Kol shuffles forward to inspect the damage and groans. "Nik, I had to bribe someone a right fortune to get this table for your gallingly fickle arse."

"We'll get a new one," Klaus fires back, incensed. "Not only will we metaphorically go underground, we'll actually _move_ there. Imagine a hole – and people scale down to get to our diner. _Literally_ a pie hole."

"And what are we, the filling?" Rebekah lowers her face into her hands and moans. "Oh Nik. You've gone insane."

Elijah rests his fingertips together, a deep frown forming on his face. "How sure are you that she saw you?"

"Sure enough that she came by and applied for a job," Klaus says. His hands won't stop clenching and unclenching. "This is it. All my – our – hard pie work, burnt to a crisp, pureed into mush."

(Nobody laughs. Klaus scowls; he'd thought they were clever.)

"Don't be so dramatic, Niklaus," Elijah says, even as his eyebrows draw together in worry. "There is always an alternative."

Kol smirks and touches the tip of his tongue to his fang. "Always."

" _No_ , Kol," they reply in unison, Rebekah angered, Elijah exasperated and Klaus half-hearted. He's very nearly considering it, but seeing as how protective Rebekah is of the girl…

"I don't see why we can't just pull her aside and explain things to her," Rebekah says, rolling her eyes. "She doesn't have to know anything else. And I, for one, would like to see how she turned out after all these years." She pushes herself off the counter to pry the rolling pin from her brother's hand. "I'd like a friend."

Elijah looks amazed. "But don't you have friends?"

"No," Rebekah says sulkily. "Between the three of you you've scared off all the potentials."

Klaus rolls his eyes, _You've got a point_ , but Elijah looks indignant, _I assure you, sister_ —

"It's true," Kol confirms. "I may or may not have been the bane of most of them." His tone turns serious. "I'm sorry. Won't happen this time."

Rebekah looks at Klaus beseechingly. "Please, Nik."

 

 

 

Klaus says no.

We've other things to worry about, he tells Rebekah, even more so now that no one seems to have taken his suggestion of moving to heart.

He's constantly on edge, like a panther prowling in capture, just waiting to be met with its fate. He shoves everyone out come closing time instead of letting them nurse their hot chocolates or have one last slice as he usually would. He installs blinds. On Fridays when Rebekah is predictably always late for her shifts, he's always waiting by the window, peering out into the streets for her.

Kol clicks his pen over the Times' crossword puzzle. "What's a seven letter word for _paranoid_?"

Even normally passive Hayley expresses irritation at having to not only juggle the _utterly tiresome_ job of balancing the till, but she also has to keep a sharp eye out for the door. "How the hell am I supposed to do my nails with all these things you keep piling up on me?" she asks with a huff.

Elijah, having finished with his bi-monthly check ups gets on the next plane to Italy to broker another deal. Maybe, he'd said, if we moved out of that absurdly lavish house mother left us, we wouldn't have to keep treading water. When Rebekah had heard, she'd looked so terrified at the prospect of having to leave home with the walls that still whispered Esther's name that the subject is dropped.

So Elijah flies off, Klaus talks Marcel into another year of free jam, Rebekah adds more flair to her mug tricks, and Kol scares competitors away. This would guarantee that they're the only dessert place people keep coming back to, if it weren't for the damned donut-shaped hellhole across the street…

A day goes by, two days, five days, a week, and there is no more sign of the Girl. He deduces that she might still be waiting for that call from them that is never going to come, and he knows he can't avoid it forever. Kol sometimes passes through the diner (he uses the kitchen's back door as a shortcut; the people he scares off have their own henchman he needs to remain scarce from) and looks at him knowingly, but Klaus glares back – _no_. But he still keeps the thought in mind, in case of dire emergencies.

And then the weekend passes, and Klaus finally allows himself to breathe, to stop looking over his shoulder every time the front bell sounds.

Maybe it was just a passing whim, like when Rebekah had wanted a miniature horse when she was younger, and Finn, who'd been away at sea had actually come home to talk her out of it because none of them had been able to. Rebekah had taken to shutting herself in her room in a fever of childish want.

"You wouldn't like a horse," Finn had said sombrely. "They don't eat pie."

And that promptly changed Rebekah's mind.

Mikael had been puzzled over this one-eighty, how easy it was for Rebekah to come around from this obsession; he'd never really understood his children's love of pie. In fact, Mikael hated it, always curled his lip in disgust when he comes home to find Rebekah covered in flour from helping Niklaus bake. Mikael preferred other delicacies: indulgent cream profiteroles, crème brûlée burned with great technique, light and airy donut holes dusted with icing sugar.

He even came home one day with a breeder's brochure for miniature horses, but the damage had been done. Finn packed his bags and left town again, along with Rebekah's _equus ferus caballus_ fancies.

What if, like his sister, the Girl had changed her mind? Was it his pie? Was it too flaky? Was the cream too thin for her liking? It couldn't be that, because Marcel's People – his one friend always referred to them as People, capitalized – had reviewed the Pie Hole early last year and had given the cream special mention (which was unexpected), along with the mention of the Marcel (which was). But then again he couldn't fathom why he should even care, why she should be any different from the General, busboy Matt, or anyone else for that matter.

He hadn't even _wanted_ to touch her, but Rebekah had begged.

Clung to him like a life rope, absolutely tugged him down that alleyway with brute strength surprising for an eight-year-old. It was that mean old geezer who'd rushed past them with a panicked flush to his face, but before Klaus could stop and ask what the matter was, he was already gone.

And then Rebekah had gasped, seeing the body.

"Rebekah—no darling, we should be on our way now—"

He had been sixteen and terrified, and you would think his baby sister would be too, but she'd knelt down by the girl and _cradled_ her in her lap. "It was that mean old geezer who'd rushed past us with that panicked flush to his face, wasn't it?" she asks. She looks upset and angry.

Klaus stands there in the rain, weighing his options.

"She looks about my age," Rebekah whispers, brushing the poor, dead girl's hair away from her forehead. It's a matted fizz plastered to her face, damp from the drizzling rain. "How awfully sad. Don't you think so, Nik?"

She looks up at him, eyes so earnest and so blue. "If I can't have a miniature horse, can I have this, then? Please, Nik."

And Nik, ever the big brother, extends his finger.

 

 

 

Another Friday.

Kol takes a crack at auditing the day's accounts, but he ends up making a big chicken scratch mess out of it. Klaus bends over it, trying to figure out where Kol went wrong, lines and lines of numbers and calculations muddling up his head that he doesn't even look up when the front bell jingles.

"Read the sign," he says without turning around. "We're closed."

"Well, you pretty much violated the Outside Activities and Employment section under the Employee and Labour Relations Act, so guess what? _I don't give a shit_."

Klaus cranes his neck around so fast he hears his neck cracks. Wasn't Hayley supposed to—

Hayley glances up from painting her nails a bright fuchsia. "Oops."

In the corner, Rebekah, who'd been lounging in one of the booths, straightens up. Kol leans his elbows on the counter, an amused onlooker.

There are snowflakes clinging to her hair, to her eyelashes, but she seems unperturbed by them. She slaps her application down on the counter with Technicolor fury, her eyes bright and trained on his. "I'm Caroline Forbes, and I want to know why my job application was in the trashcan on Grand Street."

Klaus gapes, awash with something like horror and irritation pricking in his temple, but it might be a side-effect of the valium he'd taken earlier-

"I'm pretty sure this validates an answer," Kol yawns.

So entranced was Klaus on the fact that it's the girl – _The_ Girl – standing in the middle of his diner, hair like spun gold under the light of his overhead lamps, that her words almost don't register. "You idiot, shut up Kol. Do—do you make a habit out of digging through people's trash?"

"Is throwing out resumes a habit of _yours_?" she bristles. She's pacing now, back and forth, wringing her hands. "So there I was on an innocent stroll, taking in the sights of this whimsical town I haven't seen in for _ever_ , and I'm about to dump my empty latte cup when, what do you know, I found my job application." She pushes it towards him; it suspends in air for about a second before floating down to his feet. "Right there. Crumpled for the world to see. I did my research, okay?"

Klaus doesn't doubt that she did. Her eyes are a little crazy and her ears look flushed. "This is like, so wrong. I wasn't even _interviewed_."

Klaus shoots Hayley a glare, and Hayley throws back an irritated one; like, a trashcan three blocks away isn't _get-rid-of-it_ enough? She snorts and pockets her nail file (too annoyed to even _think_ about upkeeping right now) while he scrubs a hand down his face. "The position has been filled."

"Actually," Hayley begins, scooting around the counter, "I kinda quit. My doctor says I have this like, you know…" she waits expectantly.

No, Klaus does not know.

"Anyway," she wraps up, "I'm not allowed any strenuous activities. Peace out."

"All you do is sit behind the till!" Klaus exclaims in disbelief, but Hayley just gives her gum one last crack, shrugs her coat on and peaces out.

The door swings closed, and the bell jingles with finality – and then there's silence in the diner. Rebekah shuffles her feet and Kol is darting his eyes back and forth between the three of them. He looks amused, his eyes crinkled at the corners. Klaus clears his throat and turns back to Caroline. "Well, this is certainly awkward."

There's another jingle of the bell. Maybe it's Hayley coming back for her nail polish. Klaus whirls around to tell her to just _piss off_ , but the words die in his throat, because it's not Hayley standing there.

It's Mikael.

He leans his weight down on his crane and sends his children a leering grin. "Awkward does not even begin to cover it."

 

 

 

So there she was, waving her discarded job application and a newly-purchased _Employee and Labour Relations_ handbook, probably making the biggest ass out of herself, when suddenly some old guy in a cape just breezes into the diner.

No, for real. A _cape_. He has white gloves on and the cane he's whirling around has a diamond the size of a baby's fist on the handle, and this dude, he's so shady he makes the diner seem bright and welcoming.

(A diamond the size of a _baby's fist_ , okay?)

Klaus is looking at him with teeth bared. His younger brother – Kol, wasn't it? – steps out from behind the counter, a smirk lighting up his face. "Look what the night descends upon us."

"A dastardly fowl with malicious intent," Klaus continues, and Caroline, feeling invisible suddenly, literally has to close her eyes and commit this moment to memory because seriously? What is up with this family?

The old man sniffs and walks around the diner, his cape swishing around his ankles. "Is this any way to talk to your own father?"

Caroline blinks. Okay. It got weirder. Wordlessly, she makes her way to the booth where a blonde girl her age – could it be _the_ blonde girl? – is sitting and joins her. The girl barely bats an eyelid; just scoots over to make room for her.

"Familial ties have been severed long ago, Mikael. Don't pretend you weren't the one who wanted it." Somehow, Klaus' accent makes his words tougher than they actually are, makes his lips tilt into something loathsome as he regards his father. And his father, he looks down at little Baby Fist and chuckles.

"Mikael Mikaelson does not hold grudges," he announces to the room. "Yes, my fury can be brilliant and my virtues little, but never doubt that I will be petty enough to want to exact revenge. Why, I remember a time when you were still working for me, a spritely young thing in your Osh Kosh B'Gosh, looking dour as I taught you the fine, intricate ways of dough…"

In the middle of his monologue, Caroline turns to the girl next to her, a little stunned. "Is your dad's name really—"

"Yes," she says, eyes glued to the scene. She sounds like a lot of people have asked that before.

"…we could have been glorious: my young lads, my beautiful daughter and I, raking in profit and prosperity, Alas, it was not meant to be." Mikael Mikaelson stops in his hawk-eyed survey of the diner and lands his dark eyes on Klaus. "The markings in stone had been right, and you lot had to betray me."

"We had a parting of ways," Klaus retorts, his eyes narrowed to slits. "We never betrayed you."

"What do you call this then?" Mikael hisses, banging his cane down on the floor one, two, three times. A guy with a crooked-looking neck shuffles into the diner, looking wary.

The girl clutches her arm with an "Oh my God", and Caroline clutches back, because it's _the dead guy_.

Kol sends him a grin that matches Mikael's tooth by tooth. "Good to see you alive and well, General."

"Uh," the General says and scratches at his collar, "my name's Enzo." He gives a faint nod of greeting to them, his gaze zeroing in on Klaus' hands, bunched up into fists. Caroline picks up on this, and she feels her own hands grow clammy.

"I call _that_ self-preservation," Klaus says and marches right up to Mikael, "after you tried to ruin Mayor Lockwood's dinner party by poisoning our pies."

"My _name_ —" Enzo starts up again, but Mikael gives an exasperated huff and cracks the back of his head with his cane. He slumps to the floor, and Caroline wants to make sure he's not like, dead again or anything, but she finds that she can't move.

Mikael clicks his tongue. "Only to make you see, dear boy, what happens when you deny the allure of D'oh! Nuts."

It's like someone hits a huge pause on her life—Caroline leans over the girl to pull down the blinds, peering at the bakery across the street, at the cute little donut design on the windows, then lets her eyes swivel back to them, mouth slightly agape. The girl wrinkles her nose at being in such close proximity, but Caroline barely notices. She whips out her phone for a quick check on Google, lips moving wordlessly in disbelief.

The facts were these:

Mikael Mikaelson, illustrious owner of the delightful Simpsons-themed gourmet doughnut franchise that had taken the world by storm for the past two-and-a-half decades, was a self-made man. He built his empire from the ground up with bricks made of light-as-air pastry and held together by delectable jellies and cream, adorned with multi-coloured sprinkles. He recognized the love America had for the dysfunctional family and took it in stride, in the process using it to his own advantage, and apparently all his innovation paid off when he sought to bring the love to Mother England and his store opening almost blew up the entire street.

Caroline feels herself start to hyperventilate as she reads how, one day, lithe, warm Esther Lee spies him hauling hundred-pound bags of flour, and promptly falls in love with the sinews of his arms, the ambition in his eyes. They have six children together – she counts three in the room – the last of which, Henrik, died tragically in childbirth.

So things are textbook happy, his kids working for him, learning the tools of the trade, when Esther falls sick. Strain happens. Overwork happens. Finn leaving to be a _pirate_ of all things happens. Kol getting into bad crowds happens. Mikael realizing his kids don't have the same passion for donuts as he happens. Klaus starting his own business happens, and him pulling his siblings along happens. And the swift kick in the gut – Esther passing away and leaving the deed to their house to her children, and Mikael in his petty rage suggests emancipation, something that apparently had been a long time coming.

"And who is _this_?"

Caroline yelps and almost drops her phone when she finds herself staring Baby Fist, like, right between the eyes. Mikael's looking at her down the length of his nose, his teeth glinting with so much contempt that she almost falls back against her seat, if it weren't for the guiding pressure of a soft hand on the small of her back. It's the girl, it's Rebekah, and Rebekah's holding up her chin, and Rebekah's saying, " _This_ is Caroline."

Perhaps he's a little shocked – from what Caroline had read (it had been a strangely thorough article) Rebekah had been something of a daddy's girl. He takes a step back, his eyes now coolly devoid of emotion. "You always did like your strays, didn't you? Unfulfilled pet fantasies, as I remember."

Rebekah flushes red to her ears and stands up. "I'll have you know, that Caroline here is our—she's our—"

"She's our employee of the month," Kol says, picking lint from his sweater. "Star waitress, fantastic tray balancing."

"Is she now?" Mikael turns to Klaus, like his is the only word that matters. There's that terrifying moment where all Klaus does is stand there with his wary predator stance, his eyes shooting daggers at Mikael, dancing a dance that he's danced so many dances ago. His nostrils flare, Mikael's eyebrow raises, Klaus' arms unfold, Mikael's cape swings as he tucks his cane securely at his side like a scabbard, and the air is so fraught with tension that Caroline's hair might frizz.

And then finally, _finally,_ Klaus parts his lips and says, "Yes."

The arctic becomes the diner, so cold is the look that Mikael throws them, at the thought of them expanding and gaining loyal customers and star waitresses with tray-balancing prowess, and with another sweep of his cape he's turned his back on them, stepping right over Enzo. He pulls his cane out again, and at this point Caroline wouldn't be surprised if he unearths it to have like, a hidden blade within. He uses the claw of his cane to poke through the duct tape on the door. "What kind of lowbrow establishment are you running?"

And with that, he's gone.

So now there's two angry siblings, one who's smirking, a guy who may or may not be dead in the middle of the diner, and… Caroline. It sounds like the beginnings of a joke, one with a punchline she doesn't think she'll find funny. She sees Mikael's dark red cape swishing through the night, sees the awkward angle of Enzo's heaped body, and suddenly she sees everything as it is, as if someone's just slipped her some reverse-beer goggles: the red paintings on the walls that kind of looks like the ruby of blood when it starts to pool, the primitive chopping knives dotting the arch of the doorless kitchen, the hard lines of muscle that protrude through the two men's shirtsleeves as they stand there, arms crossed, regarding her suspiciously.

And then there's Rebekah, smiling at her like she can't believe she's actually here, when it started out the other way around, really.

All at once, it's too much.

"This is insane," she declares. "You guys are some kind of deranged mafia bakery."

"Diner," Kol corrects her. "Did you miss the part where we handed you a position here?"

"After the scene I just witnessed?" Caroline clambers out of the booth and spirals around the diner, but suddenly Kol's standing in front of the door, and—woah does he move fast. "I mean, dastardly _fowls_? Descending _nights_? Did I even hear right?"

"Of course you did." Klaus sighs a long-suffering one and unfolds his arms. "Do you want the job or not?"

Caroline beams. "Didn't I come here with that one, singular motive?"

 

 

 

It's great, it's wonderful, it's everything she could have ever wanted, working in that little diner with its blinds that prevent the sun from streaming in, but it's quite alright – it makes it all the more cozier, all the more easier to slide pumpkin pie in front of the smiling faes of sugar-starved patrons, chirp a little _Y'all enjoy that now_ even though she is far from the Southern belle she sometimes pretends to be.

Rebekah comes up to her, lips a tentative curve, and pulls her into the kitchen to show her the ropes. She has an apron all of her own – "Custom made," Rebekah tells her of the lace frills at the bottom and the cute little white buttons – and doesn't have to wear a nametag if she doesn't want to, but she tacks it on anyway and makes everyone call her Care. Everyone does, and everyone does it with a smile… everyone except for Klaus, that is, who always seems to be absent from the kitchen these days.

Kol flits in and out of the kitchen, always through the back door, which is probably why she never notices him sneaking up on her. He's nice enough if you don't look at him the wrong way, which is to say you shouldn't look at him at _all_. He's always looking at her so peculiarly, like he's just waiting for some kind of bomb to drop right out of her lace pockets, and he wouldn't be wrong – she does have a time bomb ticking away inside her, shivering in its mass of undiluted energy, waiting to be unleashed upon the piemaker who'd seemed to ka _put_ right from his very diner.

"Care," Rebekah calls over one day as she's chopping up fruit, "you don't happen to be good at pie filling, don't you?"

Because the poor thing, she's been taking over Klaus' job of making pies despite having to refer to Klaus' meticulous yet vaguely-structured recipes every step of the way. She looks miserable; she'd much rather prefer being out there flipping notebooks and twirling mugs and charming people with her easy smile, not covered in flour from wrist to elbow. Luckily for her, Caroline does know her way around pies – Steven's a sweet tooth, and she's never thanked him more for it than in the moment she teaches Rebekah that a little nutmeg does wonders in bringing out subtle flavours hidden deep in the flesh of fruit.

Ever grateful, Rebekah tells her things while they bake. That it was indeed her and Klaus who found her lying in that alleyway all those years ago, and Caroline's heart _lifts_. To finally find the answer to the question that's been reeling inside her for so long feels so gratifying, like a caged bird stretching its wings for the first time in a long time, overcome with the desire to sing nothing but sweet songs for the rest of its days.

"I tried looking for you," Rebekah tells her matter-of-factly. "I wanted to see how you were doing, after that blow to your head. But you disappeared."

"I was only here visiting my dads," Caroline says. Rebekah looks a little startled, but listens eagerly to the story of how Steven and Bill had met at an IT conference, and that Steven had been wearing _plaid_ , and her father was still very much married to Liz, but they fell dangerously, violently in love, and this is the part where she puts a hand to her breast and sighs, because to be in that much love is all that she's ever wanted in life. Rebekah sighs along with her, and they say no more, because—

Because Rebekah struggles with pie crust too, so Caroline takes over, helping her knead and roll and trim and cut, and she figures out what makes Klaus' Dutch Apple so delicious – ginger! – and breathes in all that delicious, steaming air wafting from the ovens and wonders how much time she has left before spontaneously combusting. Rebekah leaves the kitchen in her more-than-capable hands to see to her patrons.

This must be how a jiffy feels like, Caroline thinks when the second day of her hiring rolls around and still no sign of her boss. But it doesn't matter. She'll wait, however long it takes.

On the third day—

After spilt coffee and crumbly crusts and a devilishly handsome man named Marcel ordering something called, remarkably, the _Marcel_ ("It's named after me, you see," he points out rather obviously, but she hadn't minded, because his smile was so very captivating), Caroline finally finds solace in the kitchen.

She feels his presence rather than sees it as she's slitting holes in the crust of the pie she's about to slide into the oven. He's leaning against the doorway watching her, and she wants to ask him where he's been the past few days, but it kind of feels like jumping right into the middle of a conversation that she doesn't even have with him.

Fortunately for her, it's Klaus who speaks first. "Do you always take over other people's jobs?"

Caroline goes to the sink to rinse off her hands and looks back at him. "Do you always creep in doorways watching people?"

"Do you always answer questions with questions?"

"Do you always bring dead people back to life?" she blurts, and sags with relief – the ticking within her ceases, the threat gone. Klaus, on the other hand, stiffens, and then he's turning to leave the kitchen. Caroline follows after him, bristling in his wake.

"Hey—" she reaches for his shoulder, but he's already swooped around the counter to put wood and steel and orange paint between them. It's the fastest she's seen anyone move, and seriously, does this family run track too, in addition to running this super cop-out diner? "I've seen it," she insists, and looks over her shoulder to make sure nobody's listening before leaning in close, hissing, " _You bring people back to life_."

"I'm a piemaker. I make pies, that's what I do," Klaus says mechanically, and walks away. On her side of the counter, Caroline follows, but not before refilling coffee along the way.

"Why is it such a big deal?" Caroline asks, although to his credit, it is a pretty huge deal. If it was her, she'd be turning cartwheels right into the sun. She'd probably drive all the way to Davenport just to dig up Cary Grant and wake him up with a touch; love him right down into his dusty bones.

(She has _Bringing Up Baby_ in a special, reserved spot right in her heart.)

"It's not _a_ big deal," Klaus says. "It's a big nothing, because what you are implying sounds pretty ridiculous, a bundle of incoherent babble that is about as meaningful to me as this little spoon here." He holds up a teaspoon, shiny in the overhead light.

"But spoons are important," she quips, "otherwise you'd be eating soup with your hands, and that's kind of an unsavoury sight."

"They make mugs," he points out, "and thermoses, and flasks. You can drink from bowls; have you seen the Asians? They're quite happy." He stacks up several plates to pass to her. "Spoons, they keep you company. They're not a necessity."

Caroline cradles the stack in one arm and uses her free hand to pluck the spoon from Klaus' fingers. It drops onto the top of the stack with a clatter. "It really depends, doesn't it? I mean, there's nothing wrong with drinking soup. It just has to be the right soup in the right vessel at the right time. Like a clear bouillon, or a puree. I'd like to see you try to drink chunks of miso."

Which is probably how they end up seated at the worktable facing each other, a bowl of steaming miso soup placed in front of them. Caroline daintily picks up her spoon and sends him a smile, while Klaus, looking grouchy, starts to gulp the whole hot mess of it down. And then comes the picking of the solid ingredients, and it's such a sight – hapless fingers picking at them, a shrimp slipping through his fingers with a squick – that she hides her mouth behind her hand and laughs.

"Alright," Klaus says later as they're washing the bowls. Just two bowls and a few stray spoons, Caroline really didn't need his help on this, but he finds himself reaching for a cloth to help her dry them. "So you might have a point. Spoons are important."

" _And_ useful," Caroline says. "For totes nothing to be kept hidden from the world. Or at least to people who've seen the, um, useful parts of it."

Klaus scrubs a hand down his face. "Can we stop talking in metaphors now? It's confusing. And I'm not much a fan of spoons, so there's only so many allusions I can make. Yes, I bring people back to life. Is that what you wanted to hear?"

"Touchy," Caroline tuts. She peers up at him, trying to find some kind of secret in his eyes (she's not sure what, but Liz has used this particular move on her more than once and it works every time, even if she has nothing to confess). "Do you like, chant something? Maybe wish for it really hard? Were you born with it? Or were you cursed as a kid because D'oh! Nuts was doing so well and people envied you so much they sent death threats at your door?"

"I—" Klaus blinks. "What?"

Caroline holds her phone up sheepishly. "Did you know they have you guys on Wikipedia?"

 

 

 

So it happened. Suddenly. Klaus is eight, guiding a still-wobbly on her legs Rebekah to a slice of pie he'd helped his mother bake, when it happens. A whooshing, a tingling in his fingers, and he suddenly finds himself having to sit down.

"And then what happened?" Caroline asks in a hushed voice. She's feeding herself bits of strawberry from a pie that's supposed to have made its way into the oven twenty minutes ago. Klaus is sitting in a chair flipped backwards across the room, reluctantly telling her the story of his first _zing_ , as she had proudly coined.

"Nothing," Klaus says flatly. "I got up. The world continued to turn, Rebekah learnt how to walk, and Mikael's business flourished."

Caroline gives a long groan. "Seriously? Then what's with all the sitting down business?"

Klaus opens his mouth, about to reply, but then he sort of look like someone's hit the back with his head with a tea bag. The tea bag here being a metaphor for _a_ _revelation_. "What's with _your_ sitting down business? Didn't you come here to work?"

Caroline hops down from the counter and straightens her apron. Klaus is tetchy, one thing she's learned, always growling out something or other, always baking pie with the vengeance, tucking in the extra folds of dough like it's done him some personal wrong. And always staring at D'oh! Nuts across the street, his shoulders blocked and heavy like he's expecting some sort of assault.

Which is perfectly justifiable, seeing as Mikael did try to poison their pies and he did kind of leave the General for dead in the middle of their diner (Kol had dragged him outside to leave him for dead in the alleyway instead, and Caroline had tried her best to look the other way the way Rebekah didn't even bother asking if he was alright, but after everyone had left and after the whole diner was dark, she snuck her way through the streets to kick the guy awake, getting him home), but a man can only be steeped in so much suspicion before his business takes a dive.

She's surprised, really, at how many people keep coming back to the Pie Hole despite all the hostility. It's partly due to Rebekah and her winsome little smiles and the flounce of her apron. When Klaus leaves someone offended it's Rebekah who comes to soothe, offering a glass of milk or extra cream and would you like another slice of that, love?

And the _pie_. She's slowly making her way through the menu, a bite here and a slice there when she comes home laden with leftovers, and they're phenomenal, as good as the first bite she had here, as good as Melissa had said, like an orgasm—

"Only in your mouth!" Steven enthuses, spraying Bill with bits of berry and saliva.

Klaus may bake them like beating down Mikael's soul into bottom crusted pockets of fruit, but he also put a lot of heart into them, which she supposes is why they taste so damn good. Even if is eating a piece of Mikael Mikaelson's allegorical soul.

Klaus has magic hands, in more ways than one, and she can't help but stare at them when she's leaning over the counter to refill Elena Gilbert's coffee. Sometimes he catches her staring and she has to pretend to be absorbed in conversation with the Salvatore boys to save her burning, red face, but he never says a word. If anything, it makes him stay in the kitchen even more. Which is fine, the man likes to work, whatever – but isn't he even the least bit curious why, after finally finding out the truth of the boy with whole planets in his hands and then the blood-splattered man in the too-white kitchen, even after all of that, she still stayed?

Rebekah flips her mugs and sends her a smirk. "Don't try to figure him out. Countless people have, and trust me; it always leads them to a road lit with neon signs flashing _Nowhere_. Pass the sugar bowl, won't you darling?"

"Don't you worry," Caroline sighs. "I don't plan on getting wrapped up with people who don't even like spoons. I mean, what's up with that?"

"Come again?" Rebekah swings her mugs slower, her eyebrows fusing together in confusion.

"Your brother," Caroline tells her, "doesn't like spoons."

"And he told you this?"

Caroline fishes a cloth out of the pocket of her apron and starts to clean up after a leaving customer. "In so many words, yeah."

Rebekah's mugs have been set down on the rack, and she's looking at Caroline fully now. Caroline finishes wiping the counter and darts her eyes to Rebekah. "What?"

"Nothing," Rebekah says, and smiles.

 

 

 

A month into this shindig and she's already gotten the hang of it. She exits her morning class and follows the buzz and hum of Valentine's Day chatter, the excited titters and the longing gasps, the opening of bags to find pink and red confetti spilling out of it, to sit on wind-cooled benches with your partner and smile over exchanging gifts.

Caroline looks upon all of this with a little smile on her face; claps excitedly for Melissa when not one, not two, but _three_ boys approach her with hopeful looks and arms laden with candy. The grin slides off her face when Melissa turns all of them away, not a blush tainting her cappuccino skin, and she casts a mournful look at Professor Saltzman. Caroline slaps a hand to her forehead, because— _duh_. How had she not _seen_ this? She used to be so good at this, her keen eye detecting the smallest of gestures and the slightest of shifts and the tiniest range in pitch.

She'd been wrapped up in pie, that's what. After class she would zip right to the diner, hat tails tangled up in her hair, hang up her coat and yank on her apron. She doesn't know how many times she's had to mend the straps because she'd yanked too hard in her eagerness, but no matter, she really does love it here. She loves the smiling customers with their easy tips, loves sitting with Rebekah in their designated corner booth during their break laughing over Damon's bad hair or gossiping over the fact that Bonnie Bennett was dating Elena Gilbert's younger brother, the shock of it all.

Sometimes they don't laugh and sometimes they don't gossip. Sometimes they talk, too – somber faces and mugs of hot chocolate that have long cooled, and Rebekah tells her about Matt Donovan, her boyfriend.

"Well—" Rebekah's head tilts. "Ex now, I suppose. How do these things go? We didn't break up, he just died."

Caroline doesn't really know what to say, so she lifts her mug to her lips and says, "If it's love, it's love."

Kol had been sloppily picking up plates from the booth opposite theirs, and Rebekah glances at him and sighs, "I suppose."

It's on this particular day of Saint Valentine that a serious-looking man in a serious-looking suit walks in, and Rebekah all but shrieks her way out of the booth and jumps right into his waiting arms. "This is my brother," Rebekah says, her smile so wide her eyes turn into little slits. "Elijah, say hi to Care."

Elijah greets her cordially, but Caroline doesn't miss the quick sweep of his gaze and how it shakes her from the inside out. He's quiet in his command, his shoes so Italian and so polished that Caroline's kind of surprised they don't make a sound as he steps across the diner, checks on the till and rearranges the pie display. Kol unceremoniously drops a platter of ginger cookies onto the counter in front the third stool from the till, the one with the direct view of the kitchen where Klaus is sliding a pie out of one of the ovens.

"Elijah looks over the books," Rebekah says. "And we bake ginger cookies especially for him whenever he comes by every month or so. They're his favourites."

So that would explain all the muttering in the kitchen this morning; Klaus' yell of " _YouidiotKol_ , why'd you have to use up all the ginger?"

He says a lot of their names like that. Kol is one long exhale of YouIdiotKol, and Rebekah's is RebekahDarling, fetch Professor Saltzman his tea, would you?, and Elijah, as she learns now, always includes some iteration of _brother_. Once, when it had been just her and him in the kitchen, he'd said, "Caroline love, is the triple berry done?"

No commas in between, not a pause in his breath. He'd said it like it was one sentence, like it was part of her name, _Carolinelove_ , and she'd just stood there with her hands clutched in her apron, staring, not quite knowing what this quiet noise inside her head was. Carolinelove, he'd called her that day, and a few days later it was "Carolinelove, you don't have to rush out to feed every dog that passes by this place," with exasperation. She'd looked at him long and hard then, wondering if he even realizes what he does, and he'd looked back, and – why yes Caroline, maybe he does—

Because he never really did say her name the same way after that. It's always a clipped Caroline in an equally-as-clipped order, a careless glance thrown over his shoulder, and she doesn't know why she's being so neurotic about it, but she is, okay?

"Caroline." And there it is, the snip of his voice. "Bring my brother his coffee, would you?"

Caroline pours it black and steaming from the pot, sets it down in front of Elijah, who's perusing the inventory counts. "Will that be all?" Her voice almost wobbles out his name – what to call him? Elijah? She barely knows him, but Mr. Mikaelson sounds so _formal_ , so… Mikael-esque, and it's just so weird how this family and their little quirks always seems to flash in her head like a given. Like she already knows their whole life story from that one - or five - Wikipedia visits.

"I'm fine for now," Elijah tells her, and he folds up the worksheet and looks up at her. Smiling at her, without quite smiling. She feels appraised and daunted all at once, and puts this ability of his down on her list of _I Aspire_ (right next to Audrey Hepburn's _rested_ look). "So, you're the Girl."

"I'm the girl?" Caroline repeats, fiddling with the lace of her apron.

Elijah ignores her befuddled look. "How long have you been working here?"

"A little over a month." She refrains from adding sir. God, how dumb would that sound? She feels like she's being interviewed for a job that she already has, never mind the fact that she was never interviewed in the first place. Elijah, ever so polite, asks her if she could fetch another cup and saucer for him, and she does, relieved to be out of the line of assault from his eyes.

"Care?" Rebekah asks when she's rooting through the good china. "You look a bit shaken."

"Elijah wants." Caroline doesn't know why she's too frazzled to finish her sentence. She lifts the tea set instead. Rebekah nods and goes back to waiting on the pie, just thirty seconds away from perfect lemon-meringue bliss.

Kol's nowhere to be seen when Caroline rounds the worktable and stands opposite Elijah, the other side of the counter (fiddly hands hidden behind the polished wood). She's about to send him a curt smile and leave, but Elijah reaches for the coffee jug, pours, and nudges it towards her all before the words "Enjoy your meal" could even become a proper sentence on her lips.

"Would you join me for some coffee, Caroline?" He's already piling ginger cookies in front of her.

Caroline can't find it in herself to say no. She looks down at the cookies, at all that black coffee, and asks, "Do I get to choose my own drink?"

 

 

 

" _Nik_."

Klaus' head snaps away from the scene before him—Elijah, too casual in his smart suit, having tea with Caroline. There's an easy laughter in her voice and a charmed glint in his brother's eye that he doesn't feel very easy about, and he fervently hopes Elijah isn't coming to any conclusions now— _just_ because the girl who happened to be the Girl is working for them now, doesn't mean—

Rebekah tugs her apron off and folds it up; she needs to mend that little patch that had gotten caught on Klaus' sharp table edge. "I didn't know you never cared much for spoons."

Klaus' fingers clench around his wooden spoon. The smell of Banana Cinnamon fills his nose, but the smell of Rebekah's shit-eating grin overpowers it. He sets the spoon down. "You talked to Caroline."

 _"_ No brother, _you_ talked to Caroline." She looks gleeful, delighted – if not a little sad. "You don't talk to people."

"I do," he replies, chagrined. Trust Elijah to compartmentalize; trust Rebekah to haunt it. "I talk to you. To Kol, to Elijah—"

"Don't be silly, brother." Rebekah waves an impatient hand. "We're family, we're not people"

He tries again. " _Marcel_ —"

But Rebekah, she tries harder. "Only to talk jam."

Pie filling forgotten, his stomach in anxious little knots, he asks, "So jam isn't right up the alley of spoons?"

"Nik," she admonishes, and he sighs.

"Yes, I talk to her. A little, when we're closing up because _you_ never want to stay that late." Klaus folds his arms across his chest and scowls at his sister. "What of it?"

Rebekah smiles at him and rests her chin on her apron-padded palms. "Do you like it?"

She doesn't ask _do you like her?_ like some teeny-bopper, even with her head a dizzy whirl of Saint Valentine's. His sister had always loved today, decorating the diner with confetti and hearts and pink placemats with as much gusto as she had Christmas Day. This year she's a little quieter; he caught her standing by the tip jar and he's about to berate her for stealing again, until he notices her hands circling the mouth of it with a dreamy sadness, her mind not in the diner but far away.

Rebekah, ever the hopeless romantic, the one who loves too freely, the one who so eagerly tucked her hand into the crook of Caroline's arm and giggles out some absurd abbreviation for _best friend forever_ , doesn't even ask the obvious question. It would be too easy, wouldn't it? Klaus exhales sharply. "It's mostly mindless chatter, things that don't even make sense. She talks about _spoons_ for heaven's sa—"

"So what if she does?" Rebekah says with a click of her tongue. "So what if she talks in weird metaphors and talks a lot and talks too much – she talks to you, which isn't something I can say about a lot of people. Lord knows how she stands you."

His sister nuzzles her face into her hands. It might be the pink twine in her hair, but she looks a little delirious in her delight. "She's quite taken with you, you know."

"Don't be ridiculous," Klaus mutters, but he finds himself unable to maintain his sister's eye contact. Once, when he was eighteen and the idea of walking away from Mikael and all the bullshit that came with him was just insistent dreams pulling and tugging at him, he'd started to bake pies in the back of D'oh! Nuts' kitchen, always making Rebekah or Kol eat them or throwing them out before Mikael would get back. What he didn't know was that Mikael knew all along, and one day, in tasting his latest creation – The Triple Berry, which is now his signature pie – he bites down on something that isn't the light crunch of berry seeds, but more of the painful, teeth-cracking variety. His head reels and he spits out the offending object – and it's a token of his father's store, donut insignia and all.

"Oops," his father sings, appearing out of nowhere. "You must have accidentally dropped it in there while you were busy doing things I do not _pay you_ to do."

His sister's declaration of Caroline's… affection was like that very token, out of the blue, a kick in the ear, meant to be spat out once found and never looked at again. He has half a mind to tell Rebekah all of this, using his stern older brother voice, but Rebekah looks like she's not in a mood to have her notions skewed by him; not today.

She doesn't even tease the stutter in his reply like he'd expected her to. She just rests her head in the palm of her hands and sighs mournfully at him. "Isn't it strange, how things turn out? I notice her looking at you, and I know you look back at her, and you've known me your whole life and you still think these things past me by. Strange. You are a really strange person, Nik."

"Rebekah," Klaus says, and he sounds miserable even in his ears. "You're talking nonsense."

"Am I?" his sister says a little wickedly. "Have you ever felt like there's a part of you missing? Like a spoon without its fork, a bird that comes home to finds its nest gone?"

Klaus pulls a face. "Eh?"

"No?" Rebekah shrugs. "Good. I was just being dramatic. It doesn't feel like that, not really. But you'll know it."

"Know what?"

"White doves taking flight, six bells a-ringing," his sister hums, bundles her apron into her arms, bustling out through the back door before he can demand a straight answer out of her.

 

 

 

She's not really a coffee person, Caroline tells him as she's stirring her tea. Elijah nurses his two cups of coffee – she thinks he might be a little presumptuous – and asks if she's enjoyed her time working here.

"So far?" Caroline blows on her tea, nibbles on a bit of cookie. "It's been nice. Good. Great, in fact. Last week, Rebekah and I talked a drunk out of peeing on the espresso machine."

"Charming," Elijah nods, and he does indeed look charmed. She wonders if this is all just a front, but then she wonders why she's even analyzing this guy like he's a production of Macbeth. He certainly fits the part, with his dark hair and shadowed eyes, lady love thrown out of a tower somewhere with all the seriousness he carried in the starch of his sleeves.

"Kol given you much trouble?"

Caroline tucks a curl behind her ear, wondering what answer he's expecting, wondering why he asks questions he already knows the answers to. "Kol's not around enough to _be_ much trouble," she admits.

"Ah," Elijah says. He stirs his coffee without as much as a tinkle, while her spoon had clattered a little on her saucer. "And Klaus?"

Caroline smirks into her tea. There it is. She'd been right to be suspicious – this dude might carry himself off as King of Genovia or whatever, but there was still that too casual pause between the sip of his coffee and the bite of his ginger biscuit, the nonchalant way he pushes the sugar bowl towards her.

So she says, "Oh, he's _swell_. I talked him out of whopping Damon Salvatore with his rolling pin and saved a guy from his magical little hands." Okay, so she'd walked the General back home. It wasn't exactly equivalent to her stopping Klaus' touch, but hey – it's the thought that counts. And what counted even more was Elijah's look of surprise as he regards her with new eyes.

Also, she doesn't add, he never touches me.

Isn't that weird? Like, not once. But then again she's watched the way he is, and even in those rare moments he's handling the till his palm never slides across palm when he's passing dollars, and he's weirdly alert to people coming and going so they never have to resort to bodily distractions to get his attention.

He's guarded, she wants to say. Very much so.

She doesn't just talk to Rebekah on her breaks. Sometimes Rebekah has her own classes to go to, and when Kol's done flipping off customers he leaves with his pockets full of tips and the cleaning is left to Caroline and Klaus.

"I notice you don't like touching me," Caroline says before she can stop herself.

Klaus replies without missing a beat, "I don't like touching a lot of people."

"Yeah, but—" Caroline turns away from the pile of dirty dishes. "Is this like a side-effect to your little curse thing? Sometimes it's like you're afraid to even look at me."

Klaus stops arranging the pie pans and turns, facing her fully. "I'm looking at you now."

"You know what I mean," she snaps.

"No," Klaus says, "Not really."

Caroline straightens up, adjusts her metaphorical glasses, and tells him with all the authority of an eighteen-year-old speaking to her much older boss, "You have intimacy issues."

"Lovely," Klaus says. "How'd you suss that out? Which episode of Teen Wolf made you an expert on interpersonal problems."

"Hey, I resent that—it's a really good show, okay? And for _one_ ," Caroline presses on, "you're never with a girl. Don't get me wrong, you're working and stuff, but boys come and flirt with Rebekah! Boys come and flirt with me, for God's sake, and it's great because of the tips, and heck, I even saw that catlady who always comes on Mondays making eyes at Kol—"

"Is there a point to this?"

"The point," Caroline says, "you're a pretty good looking guy. You've even got an accent, like who doesn't just die for that? And yet…" Caroline waves her arm around the empty diner. "Nada."

Klaus scratches the back of his head. "Caroline love, we're closed."

And that, _curse her,_ quiets her down. She picks the sponge up once again and starts on the scrubbing. "Don't you ever feel lonely?"

"With all this riveting conversation you and I have?" Klaus says dryly. A tilt of his head, a roll of his eyes. "Never."

He leaves soon after that, finally trusting Caroline to lock the place up, and feels so very much like a teenager when she counts it up on her fingers like some sort of victory and whispers to herself, _four_.

Elijah's voice brings her back to earth, and she blinks a little dazedly at him. "Um. What?"

"I asked if you have any plans for Valentine's Day," Elijah hums. His coffee's all finished, and her tea is reduced to dregs at the bottom of her cup. "Rebekah's already asked for half the day off. What about you?"

Out of habit, she looks into the kitchen. Klaus' eyes meet hers for a fraction of a second before he flicks them back to his pies. "Um," she says again, throat gone dry, and when she turns back to Elijah she realizes with a pang that he'd caught every last scorching second of that.

"No plans," she manages to stammer out, already slipping out of her seat. "I really should be getting back to work – my break ended like, ten minutes ago—"

"Of course," Elijah says obligingly. "I have business to attend to myself, and a door that needs fixing." He stands and gives her a nod, _actually_ pulls her stool out for her, and she doesn't know whether to laugh or like, do something drastic, because Elijah probably think she's half in love with his brother by now and she's not, she totally isn't—

"Look, Elijah," Caroline starts, but Elijah just shakes his head, _Another time, Caroline_. She doesn't know why it makes her mouth snap shut, but it does. Alright then.

She goes back into the kitchen, and weirdly enough, Klaus is looking every bit perplexed as she feels. She's wringing her hands again, pacing back and forth, and his eyes follow her, ever the silent one. She stops when her stomach hits the worktable, and she looks at him, the way he's leaning back against the shelves that hold all the delivery boxes, just… _lounged_ there, looking at her oddly.

"A whooshing," Caroline says carefully, palms pressed flat against the table. "A tingling in your fingers. And then you had to sit down."

Klaus frowns and she just – she finds herself wishing for the day he'd stop frowning at every little thing she says, like it's some silly babble that isn't worth his time. She pushes her hair out of her eyes, takes a deep breath, and asks, "What happened after that, Klaus?"

And it's like she's in that goddamn alleyway again, staring up at a boy who's looking at her with an almost fearful look in his eyes, space and time and planets bending between them, a hundred million suns and stars in the weight of silence that follows. It feels like he's silent for a very long time, and he looks at her even longer before he finally says, "My brother died."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yay notes: so i know i said this was going to be a two parter, but when i was writing the second chapter it just grew and grew and grew i had to cut it in two. this chapter is already a whopper as it is at 15k words. i'll post the third and final chapter when i get back from my trip in a few days. for now... leave a review and tell me what you think? i'd appreciate it a lot.
> 
> also, the biggest of thank yous to my beta Sam (empirically-speaking on tumblr) who put up with my incessant bitching and freakouts the whole time i was writing this. the first 13k words of this is beta'd, the last part isn't. i just really wanted this up before i leave tomorrow morning - or in four hours.


	3. the evangelist of the anti-butter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i think, if i hadn't so insisted on finishing this whole thing before posting it up i would've given you a third chapter much sooner. i had about 20k written and still a long way to go before i decided to just break it up in two. so here it is, the first half of the third chapter. YES, I KNOW, this story has now been expanded into four chapters, _i apologize for all the word vomit_.
> 
> this chapter is kind of a big one because, well... quite a few things happen. we also learn more about the mikaelsons' family history here, as well as a few of the characters i'd only mentioned in previous chapters coming into play. i'm going to shut up and let you read now.

The call had come just as his plane touched down. Elijah stands by the conveyer belt listening to the voicemails, all of them frantic. He hears Kol sounding unusually brusque as his bag, compact and black, glides past. His coat billows about him as he strides out of the airport, and to lend added drama to the night, it is raining. The sky opens up and unleashes upon him a torrential rainstorm, and it is this storm that has his fingers drumming an anxious _rat a tat tat_ on the town car's arm rest.

He replays the messages.

Kol is clearing his throat; Elijah imagines him with his cheeks hollowed and his eyes harried, the way he sounds. You need to come home _now_.

Traffic is horrible and he tries calling back, but there's no answer. Elijah does not curse—

(He does not have the time, nor the ability; patience has been calculated into his bones, along with an unusually large quota of rationale. Maybe they were all busy. Maybe the line had been cut off in the storm. Patience and logic. Faith never made the equation. He couldn't allow himself to count on that, not when faith has let him down so many times before. Not when his brother who was once dead is now leaving him vague voicemails. There has to be a _reason_ to all of this. He thinks. He is searching.

But in this instance – in this _instance_ – )

—he only waits for the rain to pass, and it only does once the Pie Hole gleams like newly polished silver as the car rolls up. His left foot steps out onto Vine Street, his right onto Maple Grove.

He always did like the symmetry of it. And it is with this thought that he pushes the newly-fixed door open, not knowing what to expect, but waiting nonetheless.

He sees Kol leaning brooding against the counter. He notes: it is not a good look on him.

He sees Rebekah crying next to him. He notes: the number of crumpled tissues adorning the pie display.

He sees tufts of Klaus's golden hair peeking from behind the counter and follows it. He notes: the dark circles under his brother's eyes, the way he is bent over a girl lying sprawled on the ground.

He notes: it is Caroline.

He also notes: Klaus holding her hand. Fingers threaded so tightly in his own as if there were a fear that she might run away.

But she will not, he notes, because she is dead.

 

 

 

Perhaps to make sense of all of this we should backtrack a bit. Grab the remote, wrestle with the buttons, hit rewind. Elijah steps backwards out of the diner, Kol places the phone back on the receiver, Mikael Mikaelson never makes it across the street, the Pie Hole's blinds never get ripped from its windows, a fowl is fouled in the event of furthering a man's morbid revenge, Damon's face never gets painted onto people's stomachs, – but no, this would never do.

We must go further, a few weeks, a few months.

We must go back to four months, one week, and two hours before, on a powder-white morning with birds crying out 6:52am.

There is a girl bounding up the steps of the diner: a girl very much alive, thriving on heartbeats Klaus had stolen for her. The girl in question is Caroline, and Klaus is pretending not to notice her coming in.

Here is what he determinedly does not notice:

Caroline smells like the light dusting of cinnamon on the tip of her nose on the best of days, but on the worst, he comes to know the scent of her perfume even over the baking crust wafting through the kitchen.

She comes in like the winter breeze, her cheeks pinched pink from the frost of the morning, her hat tails swinging and her hair always swept away from her face with the wind, leaving him wondering if she runs the whole way here, every time.

(Here is what he does notice:

She always has to stand so bloody _near_ , doesn't she?)

Today, her hair is a tangle of thorns even when they spring down her shoulders in jubilant curls, poisonous if touched. But Rebekah caresses it so freely, pinches strands of it between her fingers, winds it around her thumb. She's asking about creamed avocado and oils and raw egg whites and yoghurt, and they sound like things that should be put in a pie, not in hair.

Certainly not in hers, not with the way her clips glint like rubies where they lay nestled in the mimosa furls of her hair. She laughs off Rebekah's comments and say they should totally, like, have a day out, go to the spa or something, and he is reminded once again of how much younger she is than him.

Klaus notices all of this because – whether she's realized it or not – she insists on being where he is, always. When he's sliding pies into the oven she is peering at him over his tattered recipe book from her perch on the scrubbed counter. He wants to tell her it's annoying, the way she looks at him.

"It's annoying, the way you look at me." He slams the oven door shut. A slam, a chastise. Be _quiet_ , Klaus.

She looks at him.

Too late.

A smile softens her features, bringing out the rosy bloom of her cheekbones. "How do I look at you?"

He shuffles to his work table, slips his hands into his pockets and really _thinks_ about it, because this girl, she likes words the way people collect stamps or dead butterflies—words bridged into sentences warped into metaphors that she mouths back to herself, sampling the taste of it.

Klaus really thinks about it - but it's not like he's trying to impress her or anything, because that would be a child-like thing to do, and he is no child – and says, "Like I'm hurtling over a distant cliff, stuck in the impossibility of a suspended leap. And the only way you can catch me is if you squint."

"Interesting metaphor," Caroline says, and he has to smile a little at that, because— _of course_. She hoists herself down and lands lightly on her feet. "But I never squint. My dad says it does things to your eyesight."

"But you don't deny it." He's—oh bloody, he's really pursuing this. He watches the way her lips work and the way her eyes blink, and it's so frustrating, this reflex when it comes to her. The needing-to-know, the fact that he can never quite let things go; the wanting, the un-wanting. "You do watch me."

"Watching, observing. Learning the tools of the trade like you demanded I do. I recall the word _fire_ being used." She turns the lemon-yellow bowl in her hands, the one with the paisley printing around the bottom. She's more or less claimed it as hers—it was the only bowl she would mix out of. She throws a reproachful look his way. "You are so presumptuous."

"And your right eye twitches when you lie," Klaus informs her rather triumphantly, but the satisfaction is short-lived: one look at her and he knows he's in the doghouse.

Caroline licks sugar off her finger and asks slyly, "Who's watching who here?"

His little slip is thankfully forgotten soon after that, because if Caroline is the frost that bites at the fuzz of your earlobes, then Rebekah is the hail that comes with it, the way she bangs through the newly-fixed door and waves some new finding that Elijah had probably left her.

"Statistics are in!" she exclaims, smacking the sheaf of paper down on the counter.

"Statistics?" Klaus frowns. "What are you talki—"

Caroline looks alarmed at his reaching hand and rushes forward to block him, and blast this girl, because lately she's been using it to her advantage, his reluctance to be anywhere near her. It's a constant push and pull—the more he shies away the more she dances right up into the cracks of him, the way she keeps glancing at him to make sure she's kneading the dough right.

"Caroline love, it's wonderful, but one thing—" He pauses when he realizes her rolling pin has stilled, just a hint of red in her cheeks. _She's quite taken with you_ , he hears Rebekah whisper, and no, he can't have this—Caroline looks his way again and notes the knit of his eyebrows, reaches for him, but he moves away, the tensing in his shoulders a natural response.

The space between them awkward and tense, she asks, rather tersely, "Is something wrong?"

And he looks at her, into those eyes that widen when they taste his first pie of the day, those eyes that roll so incessantly when he shows her the array of ingredients he's painstakingly measured every morning, those eyes that seize his insides and reduces his hands to a useless shroud of skin over flesh over bone.

Is something wrong, love?

Don't you realize? he wants to say.

You and I, we can't have this, he wants to say. I can't touch you. I _can't_ touch you. Don't you know?

But she doesn't know, and he doesn't say. What he does say is, "Too much flour."

 

 

 

 

"You did not," he says, as contained as a man can possibly be after finding out his sister and his employee have been dabbling in black market ventures right underneath his nose, "secretly switch out the ingredients I _so_ _painstakingly_ _measure_ out every morning, in favour of—"

"These totally healthy, gluten-free substitutes?" Caroline shifts from foot to foot, watching his expression closely. The snatched paper is torn and crumpled in his hand – the other half is pinched between her fingers. She looks a little worried and it vexes him even more; does she really think he'd lay a finger on her? (Which he couldn't, but – details.) "Then, yeah. I kind of did."

They're both standing in the alleyway behind the diner where Rebekah had shoved them, because Klaus looked like he was very close to 'making a scene', as she had flippantly put it. He was swelling up like a bullfrog, filling the space of the kitchen. The first customers of the day were just beginning to step in, and we really can't have this now, can we?

From the doorway, Rebekah looks as if she'd very much like to say _I told you so_.

"I told you so," she says exultantly to Caroline with a smile so bright – obviously relishing in the moment of her being right yet again – and promptly shuts the door on them.

Klaus runs his eyes down the inventory of items Caroline had thrown out and replaced—

("Brominated flour is illegal _everywhere_ outside the United States!")

—but finds that he has to give up as the numbers go on and on. He takes a deep breath, counts to ten like Elijah had always patronizingly instructed.

One hundred and thirty-three counts later and he's not calmed down enough for her to start talking, but she does anyway, looking like she's about to burst.

Celiac disease, she says suddenly, imploringly – as if those words were meant to affect a deeper meaning in him. He turns back to her, eyes narrowed. She might as well be saying _bunion_ _warts_ or something equally as arbitrary because, as usual, he has _no bloody idea_ what she is saying at all.

"Steven has it," she says, and at his blank look continues, "It's when you're allergic to wheat."

Klaus has to blink a little, because it's almost as if she'd pulled out a chair and smacked a ruler against a blackboard.

The facts were these:

Steven Langdon-Forbes, age fifty-two years, three months, and seventeen days sat down one morning for his usual slice of pumpernickel bread bought fresh every morning from D'oh! Nuts (Klaus snorts), and mid-slice, mid-butter swipe and mid-chew, finds his stomach churning. He thinks nothing of it. In his weekly weight check, he is curious to see that he has dropped a few pounds. Maybe it's all the kale, he thinks. Spiteful little bitches, but they do wonders for the metabolism.

Then diarrhoea hits – he blames it on the kale, still.

It isn't until he almost passes out in his usual ten mile run a few evenings later that he goes on a rampage through Google with Bill insisting over his shoulder that he can- _not_ diagnose himself through websites that advertised one night stands with triple-nippled women (and a quick follow-up with Doctor Gilbert, who'd taken over Doctor Fell's clinic, after prodding by Caroline) that Steven had celiac disease.

Much to his sorrow. He did love his pumpernickel.

Thus, ever strong-willed Caroline had decided that if Steven was to suffer, he would not suffer alone. Not only were they _all_ going gluten-free, but they would also change their diet to something completely and utterly 100% Caroline-approved _healthy_ , stopping just short of going drastically vegan.

(Not that Caroline hadn't thought about it, she tells a flummoxed Klaus, but she remembered that she works in a diner dedicated to pie of all places.

But a few tweaks here and there wouldn't hurt.

For _Steven_.)

"Hurt what – the diner? Or your conscience?" There must be red in the rims of his eyes – his vision tells him as much.

Caroline shrugs. "Both, I guess. The Forbes family have decided to go health-freaky, and I've studied your recipes, alright? They're delicious; they don't go over the red light bleeping Danger! Danger! Excess Sugar Overload!, but the Pie Hole could do with a little green in your system. And that means—"

Klaus gapes furiously, exasperatedly at her, because this girl did not _seriously_ say

No

More

 _Lard_.

With a dawning horror, Klaus realizes that Caroline means every word she says, so he does the only logical thing that comes to mind:

"Preacher!" he hisses, screwing the paper up tightly in her face. "I was conned into hiring a star waitress with tray-balancing prowess – I should have fired you had you not turned out to be exactly _that_ , to Kol's fortune and my detriment. _You're the evangelist of the anti-butter_. The _I can't believe it's not butter_ butter!"

Needless to say, Elijah had inherited all the logic in the family.

Klaus, all the impulse.

"And you're the vicar of trans fat, with bad cholesterol being your Lord and Saviour!" she sizzles in turn. "Your nutrition philosophies are so skewed it's no wonder you dress up your menus with snappily-written _lies_ —your poor customers don't know better the crap you're feeding them!"

"My _crap_ helps them survive the winter."

"This isn't Winterfell! This isn't some distant dystopian era where everyone is severely malnourished; this is an era where people – innocent, harmless, _good_ people like Steven! – can get celiac disease with no warning at all, and I'm here to make sure that _doesn't happen_."

They stand there, glaring each other down.

If she had been anyone else he would have fired her long ago, but Rebekah threatens him with knives hidden in the goose down of his pillows, his toothpaste switched out with something vile, his favourite rolling pin jammed inside the hood of his car. The message is quite clear.

Nik, if Caroline goes— _you_ go.

So he bites his tongue and hides his rolling pin, rolls up his sleeves and makes his move. Knight to E-5.

"Fine," he spits. "You and I can _negotiate_ a change in my ingredients. You can have you own pantry – just don't let it touch mine. And every pie you bake has to be made in front of me, right down to the cubes of not-butter you aren't planning on using for the pastry. That is all I am allowing. Take it or leave it."

There is a sick triumph in the lift of Caroline's chin. "I knew you'd cave," she declares. But there is none of that venom in her eyes, as much as they are furrowed by her eyebrows. She folds up her corner of the inventory and says like it had been at the end of the sentence all along: "Thank you."

 

 

 

 

In the days to come, Caroline would introduce Klaus to a multitude of dishes, all of them variations of pies. On one such occasion, she slides a plate of cabbage strudel in front of him.

A fork scraped across the top reveals the pastry to be baked into an almost religious experience, but that's not what he's dubious about. Caroline rarely if ever burns anything she bakes. No, what he's dubious about, goes along the lines of:

"A strudel is not a pie."

"It's filling folded inside a pastry. Same difference."

"It's not even a dessert."

"You put sweet potatoes in your pie."

"This is not called the Strudel Hole."

"Shut up and eat, Klaus."

Shut up and eat he does, and he's reluctant to admit that eating said cabbage strudel is an almost religious experience: crisp but moist, savoury but sweet, buttery beyond imagining, and—"Is this butter?". Caroline only beams. Klaus puts down his fork. He can only frown. A strudel is not a pie.

A pie is a pie.

He crosses it off of the overly-long list of 'Totally Healthy Things Klaus Should Consider Adding into the Menu without As Much As a Complaint' Caroline had constructed. "Try again."

 

 

 

 

"My brother died," he tells her once, and she looks at him like she's striking a match in the dark. "My mother and I, we were baking. Something with berries in it. A pie. I remember everything about that morning, how the sun streamed through the curtains, the exact shade of yellow my mother had the kitchen painted. How she looked when she clutched her pregnant belly, her cry of pain. I remember Mikael rushing around, his cape sweeping behind him. I remember Finn offering to drive. I remember my mother almost doubled-over by the staircase. I remember her telling me, _Don't forget to feed Bekah_. I remember waving them goodbye. I remember the tingling in my fingers, sitting down hard on the kitchen floor with Rebekah by my side. I remember sitting down for a very long time. And I remember Mother, coming home that night with Father clutching her so dearly.

"I remember asking, "Where is he? Where is my brother?" and my mother looking at me so strangely, as if I'd been speaking a different language. I remember Finn coming in quietly and telling me to go to bed." Klaus trails off and slides a pie into the oven. "I remember all of that, but I don't remember what type of berry she'd put in that pie. Damnedest thing."

He glances at her over his shoulder.

She's looking down at the pie in front of her, stuffed with every berry imaginable. A match struck in the dark.

It could have been anything, he tells her.

 

 

 

 

Balloons rising up into the sky shouldn't be so fascinating, but it's a Thursday and Thursdays are slow days, and Caroline is bored. She's peeking through the blinds watching the balloons bob and sway, and then there's drumming and a great clang of percussions and people whooping and screaming and – holy crap, is that a giant jar of _jam_ floating by?

 _Yes_ , Rebekah says wearily when Caroline elbows her to the window. "It's a float. It's a float in the shape of a jam jar, because it's the 3rd of March."

Caroline's eyes grow to the size of saucers.

Rebekah looks at her sceptically. "Come on, Care. I've had this date circled in red for months."

And usually Caroline would remember, except she's been spending her nights cramming and begging notes off of Melissa Harp, on account of her being too busy to study during the day. She screws up her eyes, tilts her head, and – oh my god. She'd thought Rebekah had been joking, but the balloons, the floating jam jar, the pouring of jam down one's shirt, the look on Rebekah's face—

"You're not kidding," Caroline says. "Jam Appreciation Day is a thing that exists."

"And the pâtisseries thrive on it," Rebekah sings as jam splatters against the display window. Elijah wrinkles his nose in distaste, but that's about it. Jam Appreciation Day is a pain in the ass, but tips are tips.

They pull the blinds up as much as they can – Caroline suspects Klaus has jammed the cords.

It's organized chaos out there, jam-filled pastries crammed into mouths and little kids running around waving flags with the Salvatore crest on it. Father Jam they're calling Damon Salvatore, and if that weren't bizarre enough, Caroline spies someone having his face painted on their stomach.

Marcel comes in looking miserable, the sound of trumpets blaring loudly after him. Caroline asks from the window, "The usual?"

"No, just a coffee today." He's sitting with his shoulders squared, back firmly to the display window, where in the street a wet t-shirt contest was taking place. With jam.

"I thought you loved jam," Caroline says, pouring his coffee. "We have a pie named after you."

"Yes, Caroline, but this—" he gestures to the window without looking at it, "this was supposed to be _my_ party. And Damon Salvatore _stole it from me_."

Marcel looks like he's in a mood, so Caroline leaves him alone to ruminate. In the kitchen, Rebekah passes her a bowl – apples and raspberries – and tells her that Marcel gets like this every year, and there's not much they can do about it except let the day pass. She tells Caroline that there's nothing Marcel hates more than a party he's not invited to.

"He'll get over it. It's just a lot of dramatic posturing," She leans over the counter and whispers conspiratorially, "You should have seen him last year. He torched one of the banners that had Damon's face on it."

Into the room struts Kol, leering and jubilant as he always is. Back door swinging in his wake, apron bunched and slung over his shoulder. "And I helped!"

"Of course you did," Rebekah derides as she disappears into the pantry.

"Caroline!" Kol crows, his smile dropping like someone squeezing the last dredges of toothpaste from the tube. There is still some of it left, though – Caroline idly wonders if he knows how to frown. "I do believe this is the first time we've been in the kitchen alone together."

Rebekah's voice floats from behind the pantry door, muffled: "I'm still here, idiot."

"Strumpets don't count," he tosses back. "So. Caroline. How are you? How are your classes? You have Saltzman, right? Do you feel as dead in those classes as I did back when I had them?"

"Professor Saltzman taught you too?" Caroline asks. Frankly, she hadn't even stopped to consider the idea that she and Kol might have anything in common; mostly she'd never really found a reason to talk to him: he's always flitting here and there. And then there had been Rebekah's insistence that "out of all my stupid brothers he is the stupidest stay away from his stupid face his stupidity might catch", and an added: "also, he smells like onions".

"Oh yeah. I thought he was marvellous. Never really got European History; found it to be a bore, but one touch from him and it injected life into me." Kol shoots her another smile. "Ever felt that way for you?"

"Um. Yeah, I guess."

"And do you happen to have Ferguson? No? Be glad you don't, every time I sit through her lectures it feels as if someone had left me for dead in some back alley—"

"YouIdiotKol, you left tables two and three unattended!" comes Klaus's roar from behind the till, and Kol rolls his eyes and actually pries her hand off her wooden spoon to give her knuckles a little kiss.

"Duty calls, milady."

Caroline goes back to her measuring, a little relieved. Don't get her wrong, she's one of those people who'd stay up late re-re- _re -_ reading a report for class, but Kol was on another level altogether. Come to think about it – was that where he went when he disappears, then? School? She'd always gotten the clue that he was maybe the muscle of this weird pie-baking pseudo-crime family, the way he's always looking over his shoulder when he walks (read: clatters) into the kitchen, hair swept back like he'd been running.

"Another one of your experiments?"

More than the designated amount of sugar dumps down into the bowl and Caroline looks up with a scowl. "Don't _do_ that, you scared me." She inspects the filling with disgust. "And ruined my filling."

"Just as well," Klaus says breezily. "I don't think anyone's quite recovered from last week's candied jalapeños." He pulls up a stool to the work table and sits with his fingers steepled. She tries not to notice the way his eyes train on her hands, watching the way she works. If she's kneading too hard or if she's not pinching the crust the way he likes. And then there had been the time he caught her sneaking a strawberry out a pie, but that was like, _one_ time.

"Was Kol giving you trouble?" he asks, still watching her hands.

God, it's not like she's going to run off with his favourite rolling pin or whatever.

"Is he really that bad? Elijah asked me that, too. But no." She shrugs and licks filling off her finger before grimacing. This definitely needs to be thrown out. "He just wanted to know about my classes. We both had Professor Saltzman."

"Ah," Klaus says with a nod. "Anything else he said?"

Rebekah steps out of the pantry rolling her eyes, arms laden with spices. "Quit your hovering, Nik, and go back to the till. Leave us _very capable_ girls here to do your bidding."

Klaus frowns. "I don't bid."

"Yeah you do," the two of them chorus.

He starts to retort, when there's a banging on the back door.

Rebekah and Klaus look at each other frowning, probably wondering who the heck that would be since Kol's waiting on table and Elijah always uses the front door; is it really odd for them to have more company?

What a paranoid bunch she works for.

"If you two are just going to stand there _emoting_ , I'll get it," Caroline says with a roll of her eyes. "It's probably the new delivery boy anyway."

"You hired someone new?" Klaus follows after her, the beginnings of a lifetime of wrinkles working in the grooves of his forehead.

"Don't bite my head off. We need a delivery boy, especially after Rebekah told me you fired your last one—"

"For consorting with the enemy!"

"For switching _jobs_ ," she retorts, swinging the door open. "Because you were probably a douche to him, and I don't blame him in the sl… Oh my God."

There's no one at the door, but there's a dead fowl left on the front steps, feathers ruffled, bald in certain places. Neck horribly, horribly twisted. Rebekah gasps where she stands, face twisted. "What the bloody _hell_ is that?"

Klaus picks up a rumpled note off the ground. There's a grim set to his mouth as he reads, "'Look what the night descends upon us'."

The horror melts off her face for a moment as she kneels down and touches the bird, realization colouring her eyes. "A dastardly fowl with malicious intent."

 

 

 

 

"I'm going to do something about this," Kol swears, his hands fisted at his sides. Rebekah had gone out for a bit to see someone about their door, and Kol was viciously stabbing the filling she'd only halfway finished. Filling that Caroline had watched like a hawk, every spoon of organic sugar and every grain of brown rice flour. "Mark my words, our dear father won't know what hit him."

He says this whilst grinning, and Klaus catches sight of a fang.

"No." Klaus sets down the pie tin with a clatter. "You will let _me_ deal with it. On my terms."

"I think you're forgetting that I'm the indestructible one here," Kol reminds him smugly. "And I'm much older than you."

"Funny, you still sound like a brat to me. And I think you're forgetting that _I'm_ the one Mikael wants. So get your nosy mug out of this."

Kol's nostrils flare and his eyes narrow, but that's the end of it. He stalks off, apron tied sloppily, over-bakes a few pies—

(Caroline saves the last one from him)

—messes up his orders—

(Rebekah flips that new mug trick she's been practising to soften up the customers)

—accidentally takes the door handle off in his haste to leave.

(Elijah gives a long-suffering sigh. _Why_ must it always be the door?)

He's daydreaming of burning Kol's pay check or shoving his head in an oven – indestructibility and what not – when he hears Caroline calling, "I'm going!"

"It's Jam Day," Elijah says as if to answer, but it's probably just to get her to pause by the door. He's flipping through the day's news, but looks up at her when he finds nothing of interest. As if she needs reminding, Klaus thinks, what with the topless man slathered with fruit-preserve war paint who'd ran face first into the display window. "Niklaus can walk you home."

The dough flattens under his hands.

"What are they going to do, jam me to death?"

"They might." Marcel takes out his phone and pulls up the _Gazette_ from three years ago: MAN DROWNS IN VAT OF JAM. He sighs, hand propped under his chin. "'Least he was happy."

Caroline turns away from Marcel, barely suppressing an eye roll, _enough with the morbid_ , but Klaus catches it and hides a smile.

"And my father," Elijah reminds her warningly.

"I think twice in one day would be a little overkill," Caroline says, not knowing at that precise moment that she would come to regret it. "Even for someone as ostentatious as Mikael."

Ostentatious. That's a good one. She'd been bringing books during her break, cramming for her exams in the third booth from the door she usually sits in with Rebekah, and it's been showing in her vocabulary.

Klaus looks up from his kneading. She's already buttoning up her coat. She has a troubled expression on her face. He doesn't blame her – Jam Day is overwhelming, especially for newcomers. It's supposed to be a day celebrating preserved fruits for God's sake, and now they have Mikael lurking around dropping dead animals at their door.

Caroline had insisted on burying the poor bird with its twisted neck. As she dug through the snow and the frozen dirt her hands shook—not from fear or from the cold but from anger. She looked up at him, all the world's anger bottled up in her blue, blue eyes. "Your dad—"

"I know," he finished quietly. He'd walked her all the way to the park, hands in his pockets, watched as she swiped at her cheeks to brush her hair away with dirt-caked fingers. Her face was dirty, like a child's. He wonders if she had noticed.

He didn't want to tell her that it was only the beginning; that it wasn't so much as an attack on Mikael's part but a warning. She had been so angry tears had started glinting in the corners of her eyes like pearls forming in sleeping oysters.

She looks at him now, as though his thoughts had formed a hook and drawn her gaze to him. "I'll be fine," she says, despite him not asking. "I need to do a thing later, anyway."

She walks out, the ring of the bell signalling her goodbye. Elijah is watching him closely, so he goes back to his pies.

 

 

 

 

It's a cold night but the sky is bright with lights: pinks and purples, yellows and blues, hung from rooftops and criss-crossing above the streetlamps, straining from the weight of the multi-coloured paper lanterns. Children scamper past her and there is the muted sound of laughter as they trip over one another catching bubbles. Caroline walks down the street and tries not to slip on any globs of jam. It's a cold night, but the sky is bright and warm, and even then she shivers.

A cup of hot chocolate is thrust under her nose. She startles and nearly walks into it, stopping just in time. A hand on her arm, steadying her. She looks into the eyes of the owner and sees more hot chocolate, golden specks of cinnamon floating in them.

"What's this for?" she asks, immediately feeling stupid.

"You looked cold," he says, immediately feeling stupid.

The hot chocolate is still extended. They smile at each other in their mutual awkwardness and misjudged stupidity like two teenagers in a 90's movie, background music too loud.

"I'm Tyler," he offers into the silence. "Tyler Lockwood."

"I remember," she smiles. He had his head stuck in the staircase that one time, hadn't he? She's about to accept the hot chocolate, until—

"…Oh." It's then that she notices the jacket he has on. The donut insignia. The logo on the cup. The Simpsons theme song playing around them. She looks down at her feet for a fraction of a second before looking back at him, but it's no use – disappointment is easy prey, and he's caught her. "You work at D'oh! Nuts."

"I deliver for them sometimes," he replies, shrugging. "Let me guess: you've heard about me."

She lifts a corner of her lips, apologetic. "I'm a waitress at the Pie Hole."

"…Oh."

"Oh is right," Caroline agrees.

"Guess you don't need this, then," Tyler says, and starts to dump the hot chocolate right on the pavement.

"Hey!" Caroline stops him just in time, scandalized. "No use wasting a perfectly good cup of…" she trails off when she realizes he's laughing. Right. Oh for the fourth time. She takes the drink from him and mumbles, "That's not nice."

"I'm sorry, it's just – you're kinda neurotic, and that's kinda cute." He shoots her a grin, and it's – well, it's magnetic. Their fingers brush for a good second as the cup trades hands. She tries not to think of Klaus. Hot drink clutched in her hands, she trails around him and walks to his booth. It's getting late now, but there are people still milling about, grabbing donuts and rehashing the day. The General is manning the booth and he sends her a smirk before turning away.

The jam glistens in between the soft pastry, and the donut holes are dusted with powdered sugar, flakes of golden-brown almonds. They smell as good as they look. She looks over her shoulder at Tyler, who is still watching her. His hands aren't in his pockets. They rest by his side open-palmed, like they would wrap around her hand if she reached for him. _These_ hands would never turn her away, she knew.

But what a silly, stupid thing to be thinking. She shakes it off and flashes a smile. "Are you done for the day?"

"Just about. The donuts go fast; these are the last batch." He smiles back, hopeful. "Why, do you wanna walk around?"

"I have somewhere I have to be," Caroline says, but even she notes the longing in her own voice. God, is she that desperate for company? She'd just spent the entire day serving and smiling. Hasn't she had enough? "Rain check?"

It's then that snowflakes start to fall. Tyler looks up and laughs. "How about a snow check?"

 

 

 

 

Caroline walks on. She forgets the route as soon as she leaves it, finds herself in an alley, and thinks, _I should wait_.

So she does. For how long, she isn't sure, but her hands have long forgotten the feeling of warmth when she feels his presence, like a stifling of the air.

"His name was Henrik, you know."

It's not the first time she's hearing his voice, but it creeps up on her like a bruise, the lilt of it filtering out the menace that seems to just linger about him.

"I know." Caroline takes in a sharp breath and lets it out. For a moment she sees nothing but white when it plumes about her face, but then it clears away, and she sees him standing in the mouth of the back alley, silver moonlight picking out the bits of him that she's never really seen before: that one arched eyebrow, the slow curve of his smirk, his sharp canines.

"Ah, right. You're the girl with all the answers, how could I forget?" His hands are hidden in his pockets, but she knows it's not because he has entire universes within his palms.

No, not like his brother she thinks,—and she's immediately ashamed for it, red warmth flooding her cheeks.

"Nik told you all about Henrik, then – am I right? Forgive me; I have the worst habit of eavesdropping on secret conversations."

"Why am I here?" she asks instead of the obvious question, when the silence stretches too long. She can still hear the muted laughter of children, the lingering smell of honey and jam. None of it dared touch the stillness of the alleyway, where Kol stood with a story between his teeth. Klaus had told her bits and pieces of it, a broken story with no real ending, but right now she's shivering in the dark and she wants to know why. _Why_ she always end up here, in this desolate little alley way, puddles all around. Winter had turned those puddles into mirrors that crack under her boots; the debris and the dust and the ugliness buried under a dusting of white, just a dirty little secret. For the life of her she can't remember why she hadn't walked straight home, why her boots stepped up cobblestone paths and turned steep corners and ignored how the lights flickered off one by one the deeper into town she went.

He's still just standing there, in his own little orbit. Maybe he hadn't heard her.

A smile grows on his face.

No way, he couldn't have possibly know how to read—

"Because I asked you to come."

Her breath comes out in a shudder. "I don't remember you asking me."

Kol doesn't answer, just tilts his head and looks at her like she's something to be taken a bite off from. "You are an exquisite specimen, Caroline Forbes." His smile widens. His teeth are bone-white. He looks part of the night, with his eyes that shiver like forgotten stars. "You are so young."

This town seems to have forgotten that spring is supposed to be coming, what with its frozen branches that creep into the night sky and icicles that sway and glint above her. Caroline fights the urge to hide her hands in her pockets as she gives him a onceover, furrows her eyebrows and says, "You're barely older than I am."

He throws his head back and laughs. His slender pianist fingers slip out of his pockets to beckon her closer. "I want to show you something. Relax. Don't look so frightened."

She doesn't make a move to follow. She feels his eyes watching her like the glow of feline eyes from the darkness, and it's alarming, the way he never once blinks, so much so that she finds herself taking a few frantic steps back. All at once he's before her, index finger curled under her chin, eyes bearing into hers. "I said _relax_ , darling."

"I'm not scared," Caroline says, and indeed she isn't, not even when Kol wraps his spidery fingers around her wrist and pulls her close, and she stumbles when her shoes meet his and her head falls right into his chest. He keeps her there, fingers buried in her hair, her ear pushed against the taut muscles of his chest, and she hears that dull thud-thudding of his beating heart. She wants to push away but his grip is too strong, the fingers trapped round her wrist made of lead. He doesn't budge, not even an inch.

His smile bears down on her, its bite sharper than ever. "Do you hear that?"

Caroline gives one last push before giving in, and it takes a moment for her to realize that the thudding she'd heard earlier wasn't his heart, but her own blood pounding in her ears. Hear _what_? She frowns, presses closer against him, and lets out the smallest of gasps when she realizes that the cavernous space inside his chest, where heart should beat and blood should flow, where lungs should expand and air pushed up, up, up—there is nothing. Not a sound, not a thud, not a flutter; nothing.

"You have no heartbeat," Caroline gasps, and all of a sudden Kol isn't holding her up anymore—she stumbles back.

"Oh, I do. It's just much too faint for your human ears."

For her human— _what?_ Her breath quickens, jumps. "What are you, some kind of monster?"

Kol barks out a laugh. "Hardly, darling. I'm just dead. Like you, just like you."

Caroline clambers backwards. Her head reels. "I—I don't—"

"Except Nik didn't touch me. No, I came back by my own means. The horrible outcome of an experiment unplanned. It poisoned me, I think." Kol is stepping towards her now, nonchalance in the every scuff of his shoes against gravel. "The same poison runs in my blood, but you see, it's a funny thing – my blood lets people live while I myself am dead."

"I – I don't understand." Her head is a spinning record – scratched, broken, unintelligible. "I don't – I'm not—"

And then Kol is upon her again, his fingers piercing her arms, his voice dashed and magnified through her head. "Think, dear. A bump on your head in this very alleyway, waking up to my elated sister and my delightfully guilty brother. How he doesn't – how he _never_ touches you. Think, Caroline. Use that clever little head of yours and _think_."

Caroline's eyes are wide, fixed on his. Her breath comes up in sharp pants and it colours the space between them a white shroud; she rips out a _let me go_ , but at the same time— tell me. Make me understand. Make me _see_.

"Matt Donovan didn't die from a fall." Her words pour out frantic and desperate, not at all sharp like she wants them to. "It was you. Wasn't it?"

"Oh, the poor boy happened to be in an unfortunate position with unfortunate timing with _such_ unfortunate choice of words."

She takes a step back.

He follows her.

"Nik uses his hands. Me, I have my blood." A grin forms on his face, shapes his mouth into a leer. It's frightening as much as it is tempting. "Would you like a taste?"

 _No_.

Caroline forces her knee into his groin – _hard_ – and wrenches herself away.

She hears him hiss a curse but she doesn't look back as she runs, taking in deep aching breaths that get higher and higher with every thud of her shoes against the pavement, her heart a wild thrashing. She doesn't even see the crowd, doesn't feel the sharp jab of elbows and the sway of shoulders, doesn't hear the offended cries as she shoves past them. Her foot slides a little on a glop of jam on the ground and she finds herself slipping, arms flailing, her head slamming into a chest that feels like a brick wall—

She feels herself slam into the ground, the wind knocked out of her.

Rebekah's closing up the diner, but the keys dangle in the air halfway to its mark as she stares, wide eyed, at Caroline lying on the pavement. Klaus stands above her looking so _horrified,_ his hands hovering in the air, and suddenly it all makes sense. She's not an idiot, she's never been an idiot, but _God_ he'd played her for one, hadn't he?

She grinds her teeth together. "Aren't you going to help me up?"

She holds out her hand.

Rebekah, flustered, accidentally drops her keys. "Just a minu—"

" _Not you_ ," She knows she must look livid now, her eyes never leaving Klaus's. "You. Come on. Pull me up."

There's sweat beading in his temples despite the cold of the night. She can see his mind frantically working through excuses, lies that just a few minutes ago she might have believed.

Suddenly exhausted, she hoists herself up. "You could have just told me. I'm not eight anymore."

There's no use lying, she wants to tell him, but he looks like he already knows that, from his deflated shoulders and limp eyes. "Caroline…"

Behind him, Rebekah is shifting from foot to foot.

Klaus doesn't answer.

"Were you just going to spin this until – what, you accidentally touch me? And I die?" Caroline shakes her head. It's a lot to process, and she can't do this. Not right now.

She turns on her heels and starts to walk home.

She doesn't expect Klaus to call after her, but the silence still wounds.

 

 

 

 

The night passes like the longest, hardest exam she's ever had to sit through. Melissa texts her something short and shrill about jam and donuts and a boy 'W AN A$$ DAT WONT QUIT'; Dad knocks on her door and asks if she's alright, if something happened, if she'd had her pepper spray on her; Steven follows soon after enticing her with pie, but she feels sick to her stomach.

"I'm fine," she calls back each time. I'm just dead, she doesn't add.

How is that even possible? She falls, she bleeds, she heals. She'd run track in high school and her heart had beat loud in her ears, blood pumping and feet pounding and she'd been alive then. No dead girl's heart would beat that loud.

A little after midnight she lies in bed and closes her eyes, thumb pressed firmly over her pulse point. She curls up in a ball and burrows her head under her pillow, hyper aware of the sound of her own breathing. In and out, a drag through her nose and a whoosh out her mouth. How does someone dead not know that they're dead?

They don't, she realizes.

They go and find out.

She slips her feet into her shoes and pulls up her window as silently as creaky panes allow and slips out onto the roof, nearly slipping on a patch of ice and falling to her death. _Second death_ , she reminds herself, and she has to clap her hands to her lips to muffle the hysterical giggling bubbling out of her. She's pretty sure her foot barged into one of the rungs on the trellis she's clambering down from and Steven's going to be pissy about it whenever springtime decides to show up.

A light dusting of snow had covered everything in the garden and made the world look much smaller than it is. The house stands out from the darkness, the coloured lights strung up just for Jam Appreciation Day. The hushed sounds coming from inside her house make her feel a little bit lonely. She crouches down behind a frozen bush and stares into the frosty windows, watching the blurred-out lines of her father lightly kiss Steven, just a silhouette against the fire crackling and rolling in the hearth.

Suddenly, she feels very small.

Caroline tugs her coat closed over her pyjamas and gives the street a sidelong glance. It's empty, everyone's shoes brought in, their flower pots straightened, their curtains closed tight. She walks down the street with lights blinking around her, leaves footsteps that the snow covers soon afterwards. She looks back the way she'd just tread – it's as if she was never there.

The town square's nearly deserted too, the last of the vendors packing up and heading home, or somewhere warm, somewhere with bright lights and a hot drink. Caroline stands there shivering in her coat, her mismatched socks and last year's shoes, ignores everyone staring at her, and makes her way to the centre of the square, the fountain with frozen water gushing out of the mouths of chubby cherubs, where the last man in the square is cleaning up, his neck just a little bent behind his collar.

"Enzo," she whispers.

He hears nothing but the gently-falling snow, busy as he is stacking boxes.

"General," she says, louder this time.

He looks up. A corner of his mouth lifts, and Caroline wants to tell him that a smile is supposed to brighten your face, not do… whatever it is that's going on in his. He straightens up. "Well well, if it isn't my saviour."

"How's your neck?" she asks, even though she knows it would have long healed by now.

"Crooked," the General answers in his strange accent. "How's your head?"

"…What?"

The General shrugs and folds up his table. "You've that look on your face. Same one I had when I went home and realized I'd just come back from the dead. When did it happen?"

Caroline shivers again, whispers: "Ten years ago."

With the table tucked under his arm, the General lets out a whistle. "How about that."

 

 

 

 

They could have gone somewhere warmer, but Caroline wasn't moving, so the General finds a patch of marble that isn't slippery with ice and sits next to her, the sound of gurgling water the only thing interrupting the stillness of the snowy night. He fishes a flask out of his jacket and offers it to her. "It'll keep you warm," he cajoles when she shakes her head. "Suit yourself."

"Did you feel differently when you woke up?" she asks, watching him swig deeply. "Did you know?"

Was there a way to? You can't just go your whole life thinking you were one thing, but in actuality…

"I knew because Mikael had warned me," the General said, capping his flask. "Otherwise I felt perfectly fine. Why? Fancy yourself a war hero? Out of the ash you rise?" he finishes, the burr of his voice masking the taunt.

"No," she says softly. "I feel like I should be… feeling something, you know? Dead. But it's like I'm a machine. I died, but someone just rewired my insides to get me started up again. Don't you think it's a little unfair?"

"That we got a second chance, or that you never knew?"

She considers this. "Both, I guess."

"Let me put it this way, gorgeous." When the General speaks it's like he's perpetually grinding his teeth, hardening up for a difficult truth. "We're sitting here at this awful, cold fountain with our breath coming up white when we talk, instead of buried six feet under the snow. Just because you died and came back doesn't mean you have to torture yourself about it. Some people get to ride around in a jam jar on a day dedicated to them; some people get to wade into death and live to tell the tale. It's life. Shit happens. As long as we're still breathing." He sighs. "And you're still young. No use getting worked up over things beyond your control."

But that's what she _does_ , she wants to cry. Maybe this whole thing was better in theory, not so much when executed. What exactly had she expected from the General, anyway? She brushes snow off her knees and ice off her back. "Thanks for the pep talk."

"Not the answer you were hoping for?"

"I didn't come to you looking for answers," she says. "I just wanted a conversation with a fellow member of the undead."

General None of Your Beeswax thrums out a laugh. "Keeping the faith, eh?"

"Half my life has been a lie, General. I think faith is all I have left." She waves a goodbye and starts to walk away. Halfway out the square she hears him call out to her, so she turns back. "Yeah?"

"Why doesn't anyone just call me Enzo?"

 

 

 

 

She lingers outside the door the next day (after checking thoroughly for more animal carcasses), her key passed from hand to hand, clamped down so hard they leave ridges in her palm. It's too early for any of the Mikaelsons to be up, and she doesn't even know why she'd come today.

"You didn't have to lie, you know," she tells the door. Yeah, okay – that sounds like a good opening. "But I have decided to be the bigger person because I am totally in touch with my zen, and—"

"Good morning, Caroline."

Come freaking _on_ , can't these Mikaelsons let their guard down just freaking _once_?

She keeps looking at the door, at Rebekah's reflection bursting like pop art against the snow. Rebekah looks hesitant for all of five seconds before it's pushed out of her face, replaced by something that required her to lift her chin and raise both eyebrows. Her hair sways in the morning breeze, as lofty as she sounds when she says, "Let's have a chat."

"I'm supposed to be opening up." Her eyes never leave the hole in the door, which _seriously_ needs to get fixed by the way. They're starting to run out of duct tape.

"Oh, bugger the diner, I own the place anyway. _Come_ ," she orders, motioning her hand insistently. "Let's take a walk."

Caroline turns her head. Rebekah is looking at her with her eyebrows raised expectantly, hand still held out like she's waiting to lead her away into a crowded ballroom. Her feet push off from the front steps, the muffled sound of shoes crunching through ice. She tugs on her hat tails. "Where are we going?"

Rebekah clicks her tongue and pulls her by the hand down the street. "Does it matter? Let's just get out of here."

 _Get out of here_ turns out to be the park where she'd buried the fowl yesterday. She had dug as deep as she could, but the ice-packed earth had made it hard. She'd torn a fingernail. At least now she knows why Klaus hadn't dropped to his knees to help her dig; good to know the dude still had his courtesies tied up in a neat lying little freaking lying bow.

Okay, so she's not as over it as she'd thought she was.

Whatever.

"I wasn't expecting you to show up today," Rebekah says. She wraps a gloved hand around the chains of her swing. "But then again you never do what I expect."

"Was my coming back to life something you didn't expect?" Caroline shoots, and because she doesn't want to keep shivering in the snow like an idiot, goes to sit in the swing next to Bekah's.

"No, it was," Rebekah says, electing to ignore the sarcasm. "So do you want the full story, or—"

"It must have been you, right? Because from what I've seen of Mr. Man Pain, he would never just willingly touch me. You found me. You talked him into bringing me back to life." Caroline sighs and blows halos around her head. "And the worst part of the whole thing is, as much as I want to be angry, I _can't_. Because I'm sitting here in this awful, cold swing, my breath coming up white when I talk, instead of buried six feet under. I'm alive." She pauses. "But I'm angry that I wasn't told. My life is _my_ agency and the fact that my death can be dealt so _casually_ and none of you even give a freaking—"

" _Spare_ me," Rebekah groans, rolling her eyes. "That'd make for an interesting conversation. Hey Caroline, is the Sweet Potato done? Oh by the way, I sort of made my brother bring you back to life when you were eight but couldn't tell you because you promptly disappeared afterwards; kind of awkward that I'm only bringing it up now, right? Oh, the crust looks lovely, can't believe it's not butter!"

"It's not," Caroline replies sullenly before remembering it's all some kind of theoretical scene in Rebekah's head. Probably with cute waiters with arms bigger than their heads just mooching around in the back, and endless shelves of mugs. Girl loves her mugs. "Didn't somebody have to die in my place?"

"It's a random proximity thing," Rebekah tells her with a shrug. "I expect the person who hit you on the head kicked it next. A certain poetic justice to it, don't you think?"

"How are you so _okay_ with this?"

Rebekah laughs darkly. "You didn't grow up with my father. You don't know the sort of business he dealt. You think the dead fowl was horrible? You naïve little thing. And now you're lamenting your rebirth, _boo hoo_ , where so many others would give anything to be where you are. If Matt had been given a _modicum_ of the chance you had—" she breaks off, cheeks flushed, breathing hard. "Stop being such a drama queen. You were going to die anyway, one day, but _not as a child in that alleyway_. One day. The same way the sun rises and sets, the way the wind plucks out silver songs out of a wind chime, the way I'm always late on Friday night shifts. It is nature, and it is life. Life, as it goes, goes. And things that go eventually have to…"

"Have to…?" Caroline prompts.

"I… don't know," Rebekah says, looking a little surprised. "Nik's never gotten to that part of the speech before, I always smack him before he can."

"You're trying to console me by ripping off some speech your brother your brother gives you whenever you have a temper tantrum?" Caroline _tcchts_ between her teeth and grips the chains tighter. "It is a pretty obnoxious speech, though."

Rebekah kicks off lightly from the ground. "That's my brother for you. Do you want to know how Kol died?"

Caroline looks at her for a long moment before nodding her head.

The facts were th—

"None of that nonsense," Rebekah says with an impatient click of her tongue. "I'll make it snappy. None of us were old enough to work for my father, but Kol was. He had surprising strength even before his vampiring, and Mikael had a lot of enemies, so you do the math. Kol was fast and he had wits—sometimes. Kol, he's always been a bit of a daredevil, and he's always been a bit stupid. As soon as the shop closed he'd run off God knows where, but I knew he was fascinated with one of his Professor's work. Professor Maxfield, I believe. He was on the brink of a new discovery, turning humans into rabid killing machines.

"The trick, you see, was in the blood. I won't bore you with the machinations of it, but Kol – stupid, daredevil Kol – was his guinea pig. One night, Kol had left his wits in the shop and he wasn't as fast as he should have been. One of Mikael's old _pals_ got him. Left him lying in the alley behind D'oh! Nuts."

Rebekah says all of this with a straight face.

Rebekah says all of this without ever looking away from her.

"They'd all figured out Nik's… ability, shall we say. He'd use it on little bugs and animals, things like that. But he wouldn't use it on Kol. I mean, I don't blame him. He was eight, he was scared, but Kol was just _lying_ there, his neck slashed red—" Rebekah swallows. "Anyway, it was all really dramatic. Long story short, Kol woke up. We grew up. And Mikael never forgave Nik."

They're swinging now. The chains creak from the winter disuse, snow shaking down on them. But the air, the cold, clean winter air, it feels good in her lungs, freezes her from the inside out, speeding up her heart as her feet pump harder, as she digests all of this.

It all makes sense, suddenly. Their fierce loyalty to each other, their blatant hostility towards anything D'oh! Nuts related. The sheer terror in Rebekah's eyes when Mikael had swept into the room that one fateful night.

"Rebekah?"

"Yeah?"

"Things that go eventually have come to an end."

Rebekah is quiet in thought. "So they do."

Caroline swings higher, legs kicking, hair swinging.

"Do you feel like taking the day off?" Rebekah asks, high in the sky. She lets out a breathless little laugh, "And not tell Nik?"

Like it's so wicked of them, to just run off into the sunset with their hands intertwined, a place where there are no pies to be baked, orders to be barked at, customers to cajole out of their seats.

"I have an evening lecture," Caroline calls back, scandalized.

"Skip it." Rebekah lets go of her swing chains and suddenly she's flying through the air and tumbling through the snow, hair splayed around her and arms spread like she's making snow angels. She's laughing, snow burrowed in her eyelashes. "What, perfect little Caroline Forbes never broken the rules before?"

 

 

 

 

They dump their phones and take to the city, bursting into shop after shop, trying shoe after shoe, model dresses and pick at bracelets, don headdresses and pout at lipsticks. Rebekah deems all of Caroline's choices tackyand Caroline rolls her eyes at Rebekah waving around her credit card with reckless abandon.

She's pretty sure she has to drag Rebekah away from the eleventh boutique they're _just passing by, for the last time, Rebekah!_ It's a wonder, living in the city, bright lights and loud honks everywhere you go, vine creeping up the sides of buildings. They turn a corner and are assaulted by people coming and going, but their fingers never stop grasping.

"Hey, look!" Caroline starts running before she realizes what she's doing, hat tails swinging, Rebekah tugged after her. "Hey, Tyler!"

Tyler turns with a smile on his face, but it falters when he sees Rebekah.

Rebekah raises a haughty brow, hands on her hips. "I was right about your taste, then."

"Rebekah," Caroline warns and turns to Tyler with a bright smile. "Do you wanna hang out? Wait, are you alone?"

"I was actually on the way back from seeing M—" Tyler breaks off, glances at Rebekah for the briefest of moments before continuing, "my friend. It's been a while, and I thought… You know."

It's then that they notice his dark clothing, his hunched shoulders.

Rebekah's jaw tightens but her eyebrow lowers and she thrusts her shopping at him. "I suppose you could carry our bags."

Tyler does more than just carry their bags—he has a car and they spend the rest of the day driving around, stopping at every pastry shop they see, sampling everything but turning away from anything resembling a pie or a donut. Somewhere in the middle of it all Tyler pulls a flask out of his jacket and a bottle out of his trunk and they take turns swigging, their cheeks getting redder and their eyes getting brighter the more they drink.

"Oh man," Tyler laughs helplessly as he falls into Rebekah, "I have to come in at five tomorrow and I am _hammered_."

"I missed a lecture," Caroline mourns, spread out in the backseat.

"Pansies, the both of you," Rebekah says scornfully with her cheek pressed into the window. But she has a smile on her face and her eyes are closed. "'Time 'ssit?"

She squints at her phone, "A little after ten." She sees the red blinkers in the corner of her screen and groans. "Twenty miscalls from Klaus, five from Elijah, seventeen texts from Kol. Most of them involve the noun strumpet warped into a verb."

Delete.

"They can close on their own," Rebekah yawns. "But if it appeases you so, text Nik telling him we're fine; untwist his knickers from his groin."

Tyler grimaces. "Did not want that image."

Caroline sits up in the backseat, head still woozy but urgently scrolling down her texts. She looks in the rear view mirror and sees that her face has gone white. "We have to get to the Pie Hole. _Now_."

 

 

 

 

The Pie Hole is dark.

Where the silhouettes of customers can usually be seen through the blinds, they see nothing but their own reflections in the dark glass. Caroline gulps and tugs her coat closer to her as she walks shakily up the steps. Tyler lingers by his car, shifting from foot to foot and jiggling his keys uncertainly until Rebekah tosses her head. "Come on, then."

"But Klaus—"

"He'll have to go through me first." She holds her hand out and he takes it gratefully.

Caroline screws her eyes shut there on the front step. Right back where she started. The only difference now is that she's whispering to herself, _please, please, please, let it all be a joke—_

She opens her eyes.

The door swings open, shedding a long rectangular light on the three of them. Elijah smiles with nothing in his eyes, steps aside to let them in.

She claps her hands to her mouth and turns away retching. No, no way, _no way_.

"Where the hell were the two of you?" Klaus asks silkily from a corner of the room. She jumps; she hadn't even noticed him, her eyes had zeroed in on the General's body lying in the center of the room like he had lain so many months ago, except this time he's not waking up, she knows, _she_ _knows—_

"Out," Rebekah snarks, but the moment she sees the General her face pales.

Tyler whispers a _no._

Klaus is on him in an instant, shoving him back into the door: there's a loud crack. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"Nik!"

" _Easy_ , brother." Elijah winces. "The _door_ —"

"I don't care about the bloody door!" Klaus thunders as he struggles against Elijah's restraining hand. He leans in closer, narrows his eyes. "Are you drunk?" He looks around at Tyler's blotchy face, Caroline's mussed curls, Rebekah's flushed ears. "Are you _all_ drunk?"

Rebekah crosses her arms over her chest. "What's it to you?"

"Is this what you lot were doing, then? Gallivanting about town getting drunk off cheap liquor while Mikael and his men have been trying to tear this place down?"

Caroline sucks in a breath, ready to bare her teeth and snap—

"I thought you could deal with this on your own, Nik," Kol taunts from his spot by the till. He sends her a smile, derisive, deadly. She looks away because her skin crawls. "I could use a drink myself. Got anymore?"

Tyler doesn't answer. He's not even looking at Klaus but at the General, and Caroline feels something twist in her chest. Matt had been his friend, and the General… the General had worked with him too.

And suddenly she doesn't even care that she might die if she touches him, but she needs to get Klaus off of Tyler like, now. She shoves his arm – Klaus immediately backs away, hands like a marionette's strings yanked upwards – and pulls Tyler to her. He's shaking.

 _It's alright_ , she says.

 _Shh_ , she says.

She's shaking too.

 

 

 

 

Someone had banged on the back door just as Elijah was switching off the lights.

Klaus freezes. It's the familiar rap, one he hasn't heard in a long time—two slow knocks, five quick ones. The two exchanged a glance and flash to the kitchen, but of course Kol had been the fastest, and he wrenches the door open to find—

Nobody.

Kol looks down the alleyway, cranes his neck upwards, muttering. "Bloody pranksters."

It's only when they go back inside that they find—

"The General."

Twice dead, neck slashed the same way Kol's had been so long ago. In a heap in the middle of the diner, blood pooling around him.

Elijah steadies himself against the doorway and pinches the bridge of his nose while Klaus has to sit down. He'd seen the General just yesterday, walking in and out of the store getting ready for the parade in the square. If not for his neck he would have looked robust and strong, leering at everything that came his way.

But he hadn't leered at Caroline, no. And Klaus knows this because, as ashamed as he is to admit it, he had walked to her house long after she'd gone home, watched her lights flicker off and just waited there. For what, he wasn't exactly sure—he'd just needed to rectify _something_ , maybe knock on her door, offer her parents some pie – he should have brought some pie with him – and ask if he could perhaps have a talk with their daughter, nothing important, not at 12:34am, just some unfinished business at the diner—

And then he sees her climbing out the window, almost lunges when she slips a little; stops himself just in time when she regains her footing. In her garden, she stares into her window with a hunger he's only seen in the mirror, and then she turns. He steps back into the gloom.

Where are you going, Caroline?

She looks back only once.

He follows the trail of her coat slung carelessly over her nightdress, hovers on the edge of the square when he sees where she's headed. Leaves as soon as she and the General sit down, their knees touching.

He balls his hands into fists.

"What do you reckon?"

Kol's voice startles him out of his reverie and now he's leaning against the counter, staring down at the General. The Lockwood boy's sitting silently in a booth with a silent Rebekah and silent Caroline. He tries not to think about the way his fingers had curled into the ends of Caroline's hair, how he'd clung on and she'd clung back.

He slips his fists into his pockets.

"Mikael."

"Very helpful, Niklaus," Elijah says. "Perhaps you should consider a change in careers, seeing as how this is going dreadfully."

He doesn't answer. Instead, he looks at Caroline—she's still soothing Tyler, but her eyes flit to his as if by gravity, two planets orbiting each other. "Where were you last night?" he asks. Quiet. Careful.

She doesn't hesitate, but she looks down at her hands when she whispers, "With Enzo."

Kol's eyebrows knit together. "Who?"

"Enzo," Caroline says again. "The General's name was Enzo."

Rebekah looks between him and Caroline. Asks, "Why were you with the—Enzo?"

"We were just talking." She sounds faraway, like the faintest breeze could bowl her over. "I needed to make sense of some things, and he's… he was the only one who understood."

Klaus looks away, but Kol lunges at the table in half a blink of an eye. "Did you see anyone? Did you sense anybody following you? You know, aside from my idiot brother."

How does he even—

He feels Caroline's startled gaze on him; he pulls his hand out of his pocket to flip Kol the finger. "You're forgetting that Mikael has the ability to just know things, ever wondered where Elijah got it from? And if I didn't notice anybody, I don't think—"

"I didn't see anyone," Caroline says. She pushes Kol away, glaring viciously. Curious. "This doesn't make any sense, why would Mikael kill Enzo? I mean, yeah he was here in the beginning, but he has nothing to do with this _now_."

"I'm afraid he has everything to do with this, darling," Kol sighs. "You see, when Mikael decides on sabotaging someone, he goes all out. He plans. He waits. Starts slow, works his way up the ladder. Care to venture a guess on who's next?" He doesn't wait for an answer. "This is why I said we needed to _do_ something, Nik."

"No, Niklaus was right." Elijah leans forward in his usual stool, fingers steepled in front of him. "This is Mikael we're talking about. He wants something. He's struck gold and now he's waiting for us to retaliate. We won't."

" _What_?" both Kol and Rebekah blanch.

"Excuse me," Tyler chimes in with disbelief, "he killed a guy to try and send a message to you."

"He's not dropping birds anymore, Elijah," Caroline adds. "I don't think the whole honour and nobility thing is going to fly this time."

"Just hear me out—"

Klaus rolls his eyes; as if Elijah even has to ask. Everyone's on the edge of their seats waiting as it is.

"—we do the unexpected. We set up a meeting. See what he wants. It'll be easier, less…" his lip curls as he surveys the Gen… Enzo. Enzo. "…collateral damage. In the meantime, someone go check on Hayley. If he's targeting everyone connected to us then I want nobody left unaccounted for."

"You do it," Rebekah nudges Caroline. "Her gum-cracking gives me migraines."

"Well, since everyone has clearly lost their minds, I am going to do the smart thing," Tyler says, standing up, "and _quit_."

He's edged out of the booth and is halfway across the room when Klaus is on him again, this boy-shaped hubris who smells like Jack Daniels and a mixture of his sister's and Caroline's perfumes, and he doesn't even want to _know_ what they'd been up to—

"You will do no such thing. You're going to go to work. You're going to act like nothing is wrong, you're not going to rouse _any_ suspicion—do you understand me?" Tyler's still looking a little dazed. He slaps his cheeks around a bit. " _Do you understand me?"_

Tyler stumbles backwards, stammers out, "I— _okay._ Jesus, let go of me." But he's not drunk anymore, he has the eyes of a crazed man, eyes that keep flitting from Enzo whose blood is dripping down in rivulets from his hideous, yawning throat. He looks like a boy ready to weep, a man ready to crumple.

He looks like a man who's been pushed one too many times, because he pulls himself to his full height, squares his jaw. "What the fuck is going on, Klaus? Lorenzo is dead in the middle of your diner, people I work with keep showing up _dead in your diner_ and you're still caught up in your stupid fucking vendetta against me."

He looks like a man whose eyes are about to be ringed with bruises, that's what Tyler Lockwood looks like. "You think I have the time to deal with juvenile angst?"

"Oh that is _rich_ , coming from you." Tyler just steps closer, filling up the space between them with his breathing coming in angry bursts from his nostrils. "Matt Donovan was my friend, and maybe he was too in love with Rebekah to see that this place _poisons_ you, but I wasn't going to make his mistake of sticking around. Getting my life back, working for your dad—you'd think I'd committed some crime against humanity." He casts Enzo one last long look. "It should've been you, you know."

With that, he pushes past Klaus and out the diner.

The silence rings.

Everyone's staring at him—Rebekah with pity, Elijah with passive brows, Kol with a _You got it coming, mate_ shrug and Caroline—he doesn't want to look at Caroline—and he stares back defiantly.

Nobody's moving.

Nobody wants to be the first to.

Finally it's Caroline who inches out of the booth. She's tactfully avoiding his gaze and he wants to shake her, to tell her to stop doing him any favours, stop feeling _sorry_ for him. "Show's over. Let's clean this place up."

Everyone whirs to life. Rebekah goes to get the bleach, Elijah starts to discuss ways to carry the body out, lists out trajectories – no, his blood will drip all over the mahogany, brother – until Kol rolls his eyes and heaves Enzo over his shoulder.

Rebekah drags a bucket into the room and makes a move as if to stay, but she looks at him and he looks back and decides better of it, opting to scurry into the back of Elijah's car instead.

What they do with him Klaus doesn't know, because they don't come back for hours.

In the meantime, Caroline's started to mop up the blood, a serious, pensive look on her face. He wonders if she's mourning, if she even knows the General – Enzo, _Enzo_ – well enough to mourn. But this is Caroline, he remembers. Caroline who rushes out of the diner to feed the strays. Caroline who lets people walk out without paying if their pockets turn up empty, no matter how much he grouses to her about it.

He kneels down beside her, grabs a sponge. "You don't have to do this, love."

"You and Elijah and Kol. You don't look too shaken up. Done this before? Oh, no need to look for an alibi, Rebekah already filled me in." She wrings the cloth into the bucket. Underneath the flippant cheer her voice is flat and hard, forced out. "I suppose you picked everything up from Mikael, huh? No wonder you have all that bleach hidden away."

She doesn't give him any room to breathe.

The way she looks up at him, arrogant thing that she is, clearly revelling in the way his shoulders have tensed. His face is a stone. Her gaze cracks. She chooses her words like stepping back to survey a masterpiece in progress, chisel tapped to her chin, mapping him out.

And then she strikes with precision. "Some deranged mafia bakery. You guys really weren't kidding."

"Diner," he corrects feebly.

Caroline ignores him. "All your talk about shoving heads into ovens, stabbing forks into hearts. I used to think they were empty threats, that maybe you just had anger issues. Or like, some weird oven fetish. But you've done all of it before, haven't you? When you worked with Mikael?"

It's all questions, except how _accusing_ she sounds.

This time, she waits.

"Yes," he says, a bad taste in his mouth. She keeps waiting and he sighs. "He'd kill first, ask questions later. Care to venture a guess on who'd do the asking? Mikael would have Kol drag the bodies to the back room, make me touch them, make Elijah and I beat the answers out of them. All in the span of one minute. To make _men_ out of us, Mikael liked to say." He squeezes blood and water out of his own cloth, the sound of water trickling oddly tranquilizing. "Mikael liked to watch. It only got worse after my mother fell ill, but by then she'd become too weak to stop him. Elijah formed a plan, I exacted them, Kol made sure Mikael could not follow. And there it is, the great story of why we left—and I assure you, none of it is on Wikipedia."

He says it all in the same tone, an odd calm, the automatic way his arms would reach and shelve and organize when new stocks came in. It's the unabridged version, the one he almost told Caroline all those weeks ago in the kitchen.

Look where morbid fascination gets you, sweetheart.

Have at him.

"But you're okay with it."

He meets her gaze levelly. "When it's necessary."

The blood is a thick pool that's already started to clot around her. She pays no mind to the way it seeps into the knees of her jeans. He's used to it, the sharp sting of bleach invading his nostrils, the pungent viscosity of blood. He wonders how she can stand it.

They clean in silence. She's working away at the information he's just fed her, her inquisitive mind whirring, her cogs squeaking, spilling over. Her hands stay far away from him as they wipe, scrub, wring – and it's almost sad, like a loss of innocence. She won't touch him anymore; she knows now, and what do you know, he thought he'd feel relieved. That she was one less person he had to worry about. One less person to die around him.

Right now, all he feels is the multitude of space crowding up the air between them. The way her hands jerk away as soon as his come near. She looks up at him, hard and unapologetic.

He looks back, and he so _wishes_ he could conjure a smile as easily as Kol, as freely as Rebekah, as quietly as Elijah. But he stares back, what is he supposed to say?

_Sorry I happen to be cursed, sweetheart._

And then—

"Thank you," she says tersely.

It's like someone's splashed cold water on him. He shakes his head at her, not really understanding.

"For bringing me back."

"Rebekah asked me to," he replies without thinking.

For a moment her hand stills. There is a twisting inside him, like someone's gone and prodded holes in his system and left him not quite bleeding, not quite hurting, but something nonetheless. It's the truth, he argues with himself. He's given enough excuses.

She wasn't his to save.

It's not him she should be thanking.

She sits back on her heels, blood-stained hands in her lap. When she smiles, there's nothing in her eyes. "Good to know."

 

 

 

**tbc**

 

* * *

**hello tis i back with more notes** : I PROMISE EVERYTHING WILL BE WRAPPED UP IN THE NEXT CHAPTER! in the next update—a continuation of the first scene we had (i'm sorry, amanda), more mikael, an unfortunate incident, and smutty good times.

see you in a few days.

p/s: if you've the time, i'd really appreciate it if you left a review and tell me what you think! also, i just updated _at home with a ghost_ , which is another mammoth i'm working on as well, so... go read that, too. bye! : )


	4. if you like me, take me home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Even though this is the second time I’m posting this, but my previous a/n still applies, so:
> 
>  **[doesn't update for a year and a half]:** slow burn
> 
> Your fave trash writer is back from the dead, I bring you some few thousand words of pure unadulterated sleep deprivation-fueled writing, some of which I'd written aeons ago, some I edited out, some I rearranged for it to click into place as best as I hope it will.
> 
> So like, just tell me to shut the fuck up so you can get to readin'.

 

 _Now_ , she thinks. Wake up.

Speak.

There's no sound but the salted specks splattering the window, the mournful whistle of the wind growing louder and louder—the glass shakes with every howl. Kol is a hard black silhouette against the window, like you could lose yourself in him if you dared come closer.

It's  _her_  voice, a harsh rasp that breaks both her brothers out of their trance, that breaks the silence in the room. Kol half-turns, as if startled, but Nik doesn't move. Kol used to just smile off their insults and laugh at their punches, and Nik, he would give his rolling pin a wave, Nik would say, "Nothing disturbs the dead," with so much contempt in his voice you would hardly think they were brothers (or maybe you  _would_  think they were brothers, simply because of that).

Today, Nik is still.

Nothing disturbs the dead.

"Don't." She watches Kol step towards them, watches him reach for Caroline, and she gulps him down. She doesn't like seeing him like this, but then again, she's never seen him  _like_  this. So haunted, yet so hopeful too. She tries again, hoping her voice doesn't catch this time, "Not now, Kol. Not yet."

And to Nik: "Please don't. Don't  _touch_  her, you don't know what your touch will do—"

"Bekah." Nik sounds lost, he has dark circles under his eyes and a shadow across his face. In the dark she can't see what he looks like, what he might be feeling right now. She doesn't want to. He sounds like he's trying to be comforting, but she hears him break. "She's already dead."

No. No, no,  _no_.

She tugs at him, wants him to move away, come here, Nik, get up— "Are you sure you don't want to come?" it sounds like a plead.

"I'm fine where I am."

Rebekah snaps, her feet turn, hands pressed to her eyes, turns and turns around the room until not even the rain makes a sound, until the pain in her chest has swallowed her heart, swallowed her whole, until all she can do is collapse against the counter with a muffled sob.

The door opens with a clang.

Elijah sweeps into the room. His cheeks are ruddy; he is breathless from the cold, but one look around the room has him almost livid. "This could have been avoided if we'd just fixed the fucking door."

 

.

.

 

Three months, two days and five hours before—

Klaus is heading home, walking around the fountain and taking the stairs to the heavy wooden doors two at a time, hands in his pockets and a wrinkle between his brows, as one does when one is ruminating something dreadful.

It occurs to him that Caroline never even demanded an apology out of him as he thought she would. Not that he had to. He hadn't  _lied_. He still finds it odd, however, that she didn't, as the girl usually demands everything from him. She'd just washed her hands clean as per his instructions, buttoned her coat all the way to her neck and walked home. Alone, at her request. He considers following her, but something in her eyes kept him walking the other way.

The front door closes behind him in a soundless snap, and he realizes he's too tired for this, for any of this. He hangs up his coat and closes his eyes. From the arch in the foyer, he hears everything.

He hears Rebekah moving around in her room just down the hall from the staircase, her voice animated and inaudible.

He hears music wafting from Elijah's study. La Traviata, after a minute's pondering. Act four. He arches his eyebrows in part appreciation and part conjecture: a little dark considering what's just happened—don't you think so, brother? Where have your thoughts taken you tonight?

A perk of the ear reveals silence from Kol's end of the mansion. He must not be home.

Pressing up against his lungs he feels the silence left behind, a quiet left so still that it stabs. He thinks, for a moment, that he should go upstairs, put his ear to Kol's door and turn the knob just to be sure. It's one thing to be haunted by a ghost, it's another to be haunted by something that should have stayed one. But Klaus stays where he is, heel on the scuffed step-down of the front door, toe pointed in the direction of Elijah's music.

Knowing, without a doubt, the earful he's about to get, Klaus lingers by the door, until he starts to feel a bit stupid, a bit like the youngest brother he tries so hard to forget he is. His reflection in the mirror winks –  _you're aging_ , he remembers.  _You're getting older_. What use is there being scared?

Alright then, mate.

Elijah is already waiting for him when he finally steps into the study, back straight in his armchair. He's swirling some thick amber liquid in his crystal tumbler. Elijah always did like to drink by the fire, Klaus sneers. Bit dramatic, that one.

"A little macabre even for my tastes," he says of the music swelling and takes a seat opposite his brother. It's certainly odd seeing Elijah start without him. He looks well into his rounds: the bottle had halved considerably.

"Have you thought about what to say to Mikael?" Elijah asks, ignoring him. He motions for Klaus to pour himself a drink with a quiet grunt. Not once does his chin waver or his hand shake.

"I thought I'd stroll in, venture down  _nice weather innit?_  lane.  _Have you visited Mum lately?_ Maybe dip his face into a pot of boiling sugar if time allows," Klaus says nonchalantly, taking a long pull of whiskey. It burns down his throat and coils like a snake in his gut. His following gulp is a little too hasty; it slops down his chin.

"That won't do."

"No, I suppose it wouldn't."

"And Caroline?"

"What about her?" He wipes his mouth roughly with the back of his hand, fixes his brother with a stony glare.  _Don't_   _start_ , Elijah. " _Surely_  there aren't any more anomalies on your list that you ought to patch up first."

"So she's an anomaly? Strange, I thought she was  _just another girl you brought back to life._  And then lied to about it."

Elijah smiles.

Klaus glowers.

"I didn't lie." Of course he didn't. "I just… excluded."

"Neglected to mention. Slipped your mind?"

"Oh, get that bloody look off your face. I bet you enjoy this, don't you?  _Smug_ , Always-Right-Elijah," he spits, tipping back more whiskey. "It was Kol, I know it. He's self-destructive, he always has been – wait 'til I get my  _hands_ —"

"On me?" Kol strides into the room laughing. "With your dainty little fingers? I'd sooner whittle toothpicks out of them for all the good they would work against me, brother."

Kol grabs the bottle right out of his hands and swigs straight from the neck.

"What did you do with the body?" Klaus asks, watching carefully the bob of his brother's eyebrows, the long pull of drink, the hard swallow without as much as a grimace.

He's staring now. Kol holds his gaze. Elijah sits between them with his fingers steepled, gazing into the fire unseeingly, but his shoulders are stiff like he is waiting for the answer, too..

At long last, Kol lowers the bottle. "What we always do with them." A shrug.

 

.

.

 

The days pass quietly, pies are served, tips are left, and the books are tucked away in Elijah's sensible clutches. Caroline avoids everyone but Rebekah, not only giving him a wide berth (expected) but Kol as well (surprising).

Or maybe not so, considering his brother is a right fucking git.

"It was the right thing to do," Kol preaches one night. "The _honourable_ thing."

"The  _fuck_  you know about honour," Klaus grits, his hands unnecessarily violent on the dough he's kneading.

"Tut tut, brother. No cursing around the pies! They're to be made with love, remember?"

He doesn't notice the knife he's grabbed until it's sliced between Kol's ribs—he doesn't know who's more surprised, him or Kol. Kol looks up with dark eyes, almost startled, and with inhuman speed Klaus finds his face slammed down into his worktable, flour clapping up in clouds around them. He blinks away stars, and tastes blood like a bright copper penny under his tongue.

"I was doing the right thing," Kol hisses into his ear. "I saw the way it would have ended. Her, dead on these tiled floors— messy messy. She deserved to know.  _Mikael_ is running around with his trigger happy fingers and you're  _content_ sitting there playing fucking house, hoping no one would be the wiser."

"Did your death give you the gift of foresight?" Klaus thrashes against Kol but to no avail. His muscles strain, his neck creaks, and he's inhaling flour and coughing out spit and cinnamon. "Get  _off_ , you  _bloody_ —"

Kol steps back easily. Klaus wheezes against the table, fingers curling into fists, the bowl of filling upset all over the dough. There is blood stained on his sleeve, Kol's, and he turns to see his brother absently fingering the already-mended wound.

"I may look like a right prat, parading around like a nineteen-year old, but I'm older than you. Older than Elijah, older than Finn even. I know things." Kol yanks off his apron and balls it up before whipping it into the sink. "Gods curse me for saying this, but I've got your best interests at heart."

"You would like to think so, wouldn't you?"

"Wouldn't  _you?_ " Kol flashes a smile before leaving.

Klaus makes sure he's absolutely gone before collapsing onto the table, heels of his hands pressed into his eyes, swallowing down a sob, because he would, he would, he  _would_.

 

.

.

 

The days don't get any warmer, but they do change from a frigid cold to a late winter cool that is quiet pleasant during midday. Klaus still keeps the blinds pulled low, but that doesn't stop the light from bursting in one day in the form of Rebekah bouncing around the kitchen, rustling up that old box of Mother's recipes.

"Cinnamon, brown sugar…" she is murmuring to herself, flour dotted on the tip of her nose, intent as she is on the little frayed card in her hands. "Coconut extract? Really? I would have never thought."

Klaus picks up a bottle of molasses syrup, and frowns. "What's all this?"

"Baking something." The look she gives him is one of irritation, as if it should be obvious enough. He matches her gaze, and she sighs sharply. "Caroline's birthday."

Klaus blinks.

" _Tomorrow_?" she prompts.

He looks down at his hands and wills them to wrap around his favourite rolling pin, for want of something to do with them. His voice sounds terse, appallingly in his ears, when he says, "I wasn't invited."

"Oh  _don't_  be petty, Nik." Rebekah rolls her eyes and reaches for one of the bowls stacked underneath the table. She seems to have little patience today – not that she had the minimal amount even on normal days. "Of course the invitation extends to all of us."

When he says nothing, she peers at him over her measuring cup with narrowed eyes. "You're not going to do that idiotic thing where you pine and not show up, are you?"

"I don't pine." To change the subject, he adds: "And you're measuring it wrong. It says a quarter cup right there."

"Don't change the subject," Rebekah says reproachfully, and in the same manner taps some flour out of the cup. "But just to stroke your ego since you  _so_ need it,  _yes_ , of course you're invited, you're not  _un_ wanted, although why you aren't is a surprise to me as well since you're a total dick."

Strangely, the remark stings. He tightens his grip around the smooth wood, dusted with its omnipresent flour, the chip in one of the handles, the rough scratch of his initials on the other, faded now. Mother's, it had been. Rebekah sighs a final time and puts down the measuring cup.

"Nik," she says softly. "Come help me with this. I think you sweat over this once or something, I can't read it worth a damn."

 

.

.

 

He should have told her.

He runs a hand over her side of the pantry. She'd been here just moments before, he can smell her in the air. He'd been careful not to look at her, not to touch her. He hears the excited whoops of patrons outside, whistling, the clatter of cutlery as a clumsy rendition of Happy Birthday is sung.

Red is very becoming on her, the telltale sign of life flushed high in one's cheeks, and it would be stained on hers, and it would probably stay there the entire day – Caroline, she flushes easily, it's all that delicate skin she has coating her bones. She would flush and blush and mutter and gleam up at him, and he won't understand—will never understand.

It's not until later in the evening that Rebekah finds him fiddling with the oven settings. Her eyes are lined with kohl and she's in a pretty yellow dress. Her face is wiped clean of emotion, which settles strangely in his stomach. Rebekah is never hard to read.

"Are you sure you don't want to come?"

"I'm fine where I—" Klaus stops. "I—"

 

.

.

 

There is a pie on his worktable.

He ruminates over the meaning of this as he pours himself some bourbon. Surprised, he thinks. He feels surprised. And also guilt, a downturn of his mouth, that coil in his gut from last week tightening. It's her birthday. She shouldn't be baking. But he would be lying if he said he hadn't missed the strudels.

It's late, he decides. He also decides he's tired, which would explain his contemplative nature. He also decides that he should get as adequately buzzed as possible and head to bed, until he hears the jingle of the front bell.

"We're closed," he mutters, and turns around to see—

"Caroline."

It's dark in the kitchen, but Klaus can make out her blushed cheeks and soft eyes. She's looking at him in an accusatory manner, but then she steps out from the shadows, and he can see that she looks… sad.

It puzzles him as much as it twists in his chest. He isn't used to seeing her this way.

He looks at her and she looks back, and he wants to shake her, wants her to stop expecting things of him.

"It was my birthday," Caroline says slowly when the silence stretches. She pulls her shawl tighter around her shoulders. "Everyone was there. Rebekah, Stefan – even Tyler."

Klaus swallows as she steps closer. He can't look away, not even when the mention of the Lockwood brat settles like a stone in his stomach, hardening his insides. Spreading.

Tyler had been there, he knows. After all, so had he. Lingering on her porch for so long even Rebekah snorted and pushed past him to get inside. And when he'd finally decided to come in, he sees Tyler and Caroline, foreheads locked together in a wrestle that would have been deemed _adorable_  by the people crowding around them cheering and hollering. And Caroline had laughed, had looked so  _lively_  at the way Tyler's hands pressed into the side of her neck to hold her off,  _Alright_  Birthday Girl, you win.

The weight that had settled inside him is not unlike the weight he feels now, and maybe that's what keeps him from telling her that he'd been there, because then he'd have to explain why he'd left. But he'd stood at her house. Just outside the front door, the soles of his shoes already stepped over the welcome mat. I was there, Caroline. You looked beautiful.

You  _look_  beautiful.

Klaus clenches his jaw, killing the words, throttling them, before they drop out of his mouth. All he says is, "I just thought you wouldn't have liked my being there."

"Why else would I have invited you if I didn't?" Caroline retorts.

"You invited Rebekah."

"Which extended to  _you_!" She stops with a huff, just an arms' length away from him. "I waited for you, you know. For  _so_ long. My dads, they made cake. Red velvet, with extra cream cheese. Broke our diet just for this. It's my favourite, but you wouldn't know, would you?" She giggles and promptly claps her hand to her mouth.

"Caroline," he says, the words a struggle in his chest. "Love—"

"Do you even mean that?" she hisses, her eyes glinting in sudden, bright fury. "Those words you say.  _Love_." There's poison on her tongue, and for a brief moment he wonders how it would taste against his.

Under any other circumstance, if it were any other girl, he would have reached a hand out as she sways where she's standing, but it's not just another girl – hell, he's not even sure if he even  _would_  reach out if it were. It's Caroline. So Klaus' arms remain by his side, and Caroline steadies herself against the work table. Her words are harsh and quick, and she looks a little drunk, so Klaus asks the obvious question:

"Are you drunk?"

Caroline lifts herself up on the table, the back of her knees cutting into the edges, her palms pressed against the scuff marks he'd left there what seemed like a lifetime ago. "A little. It was some party."

"If this is you trying to guilt me—"

"It is," Caroline snaps. A piece of her hair falls into her eyes, and Klaus is overcome with a strange desire to push it back, trace the back of his fingers against her cheeks. He's not—he's not used to this. Maybe he looks at it a beat too long, because Caroline brushes it away herself with some impatience. "You're not stupid. Why are you pretending to be stupid? Stop – being – stupid."

With every word she says she leans closer, and Klaus has nowhere to go – he's rooted to his stool, the metal edges of the shelf digging into his spine. His hands are suspended in mid-air as far away from her as possible. "Caroline. You're drunk. Please remember where we are."

Her eyes bear into his, a little befuddled. They're a whirl of blue and grey crashing together in their uncertainty, like she's trying to figure out if it is indeed him sitting in front of her. People had always told him that he and Rebekah had the bluest eyes they'd ever seen, but Caroline, with all her incessant chatter and mixed metaphors that make no sense—Caroline had eyes like the ocean, drowning him.

"You're so afraid of me," Caroline whispers. The tide in her eyes ebbs and breaks. "Look at you. You can't even hold my gaze longer than a second."

"You know why," he says hoarsely. He can smell the sweet musk of her, rolling notes of rose and neroli – dusky and dreamy and sad, like the smell that lingers off a scarf after a day of wearing it. He's never really been this close before. Not since the first time he'd touched her. This is  _not_ going to be the last. He exhales sharply and reaches a steady hand out to touch the velvet of her dress, gently pushing her back. "Enough of this."

Her hands shoots out to grab his wrist, and for one terrifying moment Klaus feels something cold wash over his stomach and he expects the light to drain out of her, a zap and a zing and she's blue and cold on the ground—but then his heart sputters and starts again when he realizes she's wearing gloves, delicate silk pushed all the way to her elbows. He's so relieved he slumps back against the shelf with a rattly chest, but Caroline's still got a hold of his wrist.

"God, you're so – you're so  _dead_." She sounds angry now, blinking furiously.

Klaus has to bark out a laugh then. Ridiculous, silly, remarkable girl, you don't know what you're saying— " _I'm_  dead? Says the girl who was brought back to life."

By him, no less.

"No, you're like – you're alive, which is the stupidest part, but…" Caroline screws her eyes shut, grappling for words. "You're just there, not living. You're not dead, and that's all there is to it. You keep your head down, you  _tiptoe around me_ —don't get me wrong, like, you snarl and you scream at everyone all the time, but when it's moments like these… nothing."

She opens her ocean eyes again, and it's the clearest he's ever seen them. "I feel sorry for you."

Sorry.  _Sorry_. Such an inconsequential word, but it rings in his ears. Klaus stands and pries her fingers slowly off his wrist; opens and closes them to get his blood flowing again – her's had been a death grip. " _Enough_  of this," he says again, deathly quiet. "Of all the things you should say to the person who hired you – yes, look at me, I  _hired_ you. You're my employee. I don't owe you anything, and I don't even know how you got the notion in your head that my bringing you back actually meant  _anything_." Even as he says this, he feels the stone in his chest cracking, tides crashing and winds screaming against it. "Rebekah asked me to. That's all there is to it. You were a favour for my sister."

Caroline inhales sharply. For the longest moment she is silent, but her eyes never stray from his. The air between them feels so thick he can hardly breathe, and the spot where her fingers had wrapped around his wrist prickle. He stands his ground, determined not to be the first one to look away. Finally, she lets out the breath she'd held in. Still standing so close that all that hot air ripple across the wrinkles of his shirt.

"Okay," she says quietly. She pushes away from the table, and now there's nothing but mere inches between them. She turns away and it's strange: he'd expected some perverse joy of getting one over her, but instead it's like a kick in the gut—he feels winded, a knot that's twisted too tight and just won't give, no matter how much she picks and she tugs. She'd backed him into a wall both physically and figuratively, and he lashes out as easily as she takes in a breath, his words like the callous slap of Mikael's unforgiving hand. Maybe he has become Mikael. He feels a jolt, a sting, and he starts to move away but she's already beaten him to it, making sure not to brush any part of him, her shawl trailing behind her. How easily she turns her back on him, how quickly she picks she puts herself back together, squared shoulders and lifted chin, hair like a parade down her back. "Okay."

It's a little unnerving to him, and after a while he realizes why: it's the same look his sister gets whenever she announces that she's had it, that she's leaving. And he has to ask: "Does this mean you quit?"

Caroline doesn't answer until she has her hand on the duct-tape knob. And even then, she does not turn. "Ever the optimist, aren't you?"

He opens his mouth to respond, fuck if he knows anything these days, but she's already gone. He is left standing rather foolishly in the absence of her wake, the smell of neroli still floating in the air. He clears his throat, goes back to the counter where the pie still lay.

"No use leaving a good pie to waste," he mutters to no one, reproachful, slightly ashamed that he's trying to defend himself to a pie. It spurns him, and he cuts himself a large, jagged piece.

He wonders if it's the argument, the words he said, that look on her face that leaves a strange, acrid taste in the back of his mouth, but on the third bite, the room swims around him, and he hits the floor.

 

.

.

 

Rebekah holds him down as best as she can, but it's no use, he is too agitated, he must  _leave_ , why are his feet so bloody cold, why don't his hands  _work_ —and shit. Work.

"I need to  _work_." He shudders over his words, torn from his throat in a pale wheeze. Even as he tries to sit up his back betrays him; he would not move from this bed, not for a few days at least. Elijah, knowing this, gives him a mournful smile and Klaus feels his chest seize with terror: he isn't _dying_ , is he?

Elijah places a cold hand on his arm, and it hisses on contact – his body has been lit on fire. "Rest," his brother says gently, but even then it sounded like something read off a list. "Caroline will take care of everything."

"No she won't," he moans into his pillow, his voice threatening to break. "No she won't, no she  _won't_."

" _Niklaus—_ "

Caroline, Elijah says, but it does little to quell the stifling behind his ribcage.  _Caroline_ , Elijah says again, easing her name off his stringent tongue, forcing it onto him like an antibiotic that would not take.

Caroline, Elijah says, and she comes to him in a fever dream, her lips a slick cherry red and her eyes blue jets that glimmer. She brings the sun to him in her fists, clenched so tight he fears they might bleed, and even as she fades in and out of his sweat-lidded vision she never once looks away, and the lines of her bleed into the trenches of him, but it's only when Esther appears that he first starts to doubt if Caroline was ever there at all.

It is a dream, as he feared, and his hand closes around nothing—the sun is gone, and the moon is smiling down at him, the haze of his mother's eyes caressing his cheeks while her hands remain folded in her lap. "Your dreams are ever so strange, Nik."

He coughs and there might be blood, the way his wasted tongue curls in his mouth. "Wasn't that what you loved about me, Mother?"

Esther purses her lips at him and he feels a tenderness flood his heart; she always smiled like she was just on the edge of pain, and cold as it is, it's a smile he hasn't seen in years. "Isn't that what you love about Caroline?"

No, he moans into his pillow, wet and raspy. No, no, no. Esther is on the edge of his bed now, brushing his hair away from his forehead, and his mother, she never does smile with her teeth, does she? She says teeth were meant to bite, to mar. He sinks against the soft touch of her palm and blinks back the tears; he could blame it on beads of sweat collecting in pools under his eyes and she would be none the wiser, because she is dead. "I'm talking to a ghost," and how rueful he sounds, in this thousand-thread count nest.

"No, darling." Esther leans in and presses a kiss on the crown of his head. He can't feel it at all. "You're talking to yourself."

And then she's gone.

He falls in and out of these dreams for hours, days, weeks, he really can't tell. He walks around, peeks into rooms and walks down corridors. Finds a vast room, all the same dusty floors, grungy red bricks as the ones outside, but the next time he looks in it's completely empty. The walls are a bright white, and in the middle of it is a girl child, drawing pictures on the floor.

"Hello?" he calls. It echoes around him, all around the room, but he's not sure it came from him.

The girl doesn't look up as he approaches, eyes glued to the coloured pencil in her chubby little fist, drawing wobbly lines and shading them furiously. Her eyebrows are knit together, her curly golden hair flopping about her head like little dog-ears.

He crouches down next to her. "What are you doing?"

"Isn't it obvious?" Her voice is high and girlish, and like his voice it echoes around the room, but stronger, sharper.

He follows her hand and watches as she draws a tail, two beady eyes, the curved torso of some beast, and – it's a horse. A silver prancing horse. She draws two more in quick succession, moving always to her right, and soon enough she has a ring of silver prancing horses around her.

"Is this a dream?"

The horses dance before his eyes.

"Does it feel like one?"

He thinks about it.

No, not really.

His mouth feels sticky and dry, his eyes burn with every blink. He closes them, listens to the sound of her pencil scratching against the floor. There's nobody else here, just him and this girl. He doesn't even know where  _here_  is, but oddly enough, he feels calm. Tired, his back aches and his stomach burns, but he feels calm. He opens his eyes again, watches her face twist in concentration. And he doesn't know what makes him ask, "Am I dead?"

Her pencil stills, but doesn't stop. She leans down to blow coloured dust away, and somehow he knows she's stalling for time. Her chubby child cheeks puff out and she blows and blows until her horses look windswept, stallions fit for battle if not for the delicate lines she'd shaped them with.

"No," she says at long last, decidedly, like trying to discern which colour to shade her horses in next. "Not yet."

"Oh."

He joins her on the floor. He wants to ask why she's sitting here, drawing silver horses in a spiral around them. He wants to ask if it will ever end, or if she'll keep on going, until the whole room is filled with them. But they don't feel like the sort of questions he should be asking.

He feels something drop on his head, something wet and warm. A splash. Then another one, and another, and another. He lifts his jacket over his head, over the girl, but she doesn't seem bothered that it's started to rain, storm clouds coming to chase her horses away. She keeps drawing.

The rain falls harder.

Her horses drown.

He swallows, feels something seize in his chest, feels his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth, and he's caught in a fit of coughing, his mouth watering, his chest wheezing, falling to his side.

"Caroline," he gasps, and the girl finally looks up.

Her eyes are blue, blown out by the moon.

The rain falls harder.

The rain swaths him, almost robe-like, blocking out all sound and nearly all of his sight.

"How do I get out of here?" he yells over the roar. "How do I leave, how do I get  _out_?"

She sighs and puts away her pencil. Her horses are melting into the puddles, but the one by her feet, the very first one, remains dry and intact. She smiles a satisfied one before getting to her tiny feet. Her pencil drops to the floor with a wet clatter, but she pays it no mind because she's reaching down to him. "Come on. I'll show you the way."

It's an effort to even lift his arm off the ground, and it feels as if her hand hovers in the space between them for a long time before he even grasps it, and suddenly he's sitting up in bed, chest heaving, something wet and cool trickling down his forehead.

It's not the rain. His vision clears and he sees Rebekah, damp cloth in hand. Her eyes wide, her mouth opening and closing around words half-formed before she finally gasps, "Nik! You're awake!"

He lies back against his pillows, breathing rapid and shallow. "How—" He coughs something guttural. His throat is a dry desert. "How long have I been out?"

"A few days," Rebekah says. He looks closely at her: she has dark circles under her eyes, worry fixed in lines in her forehead that he hopes aren't permanent. "You were having seizures, Nik. After that stomach pump, and you were still… We thought your kidneys were going to fail. We were so scared,  _I_  was so scared, Nik," she whispers, reaching over to mop his brow.

He pushes her hand away but she glares at him, determined to play nurse to his frail patient. She allows him to roll over for a glass of water, however, and as he drinks, he remembers. "It was the pie, wasn't it? It was—" Realization spreads in his throat like a bitter pill. Stupid,  _stupid_ , Niklaus— "…Mikael's pie."

"Ricin poisoning," Rebekah says, biting her lip. "It's like he wanted to kill you, oh, you know there's no cure for it. You scared us bloody. All we could do was wait, and Caroline, she—"

"Caroline was here?" he croaks.

She shoots him an irritated knowing look at being interrupted, but smiles nonetheless. "She came every day."

He remains still, his stomach coiling and uncoiling. "Does she still hate me?"

This time, Rebekah laughs. "You're alive, let's not press your luck further."

 

.

.

 

After a maddening amount of bedrest pressed upon him by his sister, he almost rips his bedsheets in half in his insistence that it's  _time,_ he has to get back back to business, and he has to convince Kol to stop spiking his food with his blood and Elijah not to postpone his Versailles trip and Rebekah to  _hand_  him back his goddamn rolling pin.

It is that exact moment that Rebekah relinquishes his treasured item that they stop fussing over him, and Klaus convinces himself that he is not disappointed. Back to the Pie Hole.

Klaus doesn't know what to expect, but it's certainly not this much sun.

Over the course of his illness someone had ripped the blinds from the windows, leaving the diner bare for the world (or Maple Grove and Vine Street, at any rate) to see. Klaus scratches at the stubble on his chin, wondering where they'd stashed it. The blinds had been eight feet in length, fitted to each window, and removing them would be no easy feat. He even checks the dumpster in the alley behind the diner, but finds nothing.

It turns out Rebekah had been behind it, giggling in a corner with Caroline, and he doesn't know why but he finds it… irking.

"Mikael could—"

"Let's not think about that old fart right now."

"He nearly killed me," he says in amazement.

"Funny, you were the one eager to get out of bed."

"To exact  _revenge!_ "

"Oh it's always revenge this, murder that," his sister snips. "And you wonder why this goes on and on. Yes, I promise you we will deal with it sometime in the future, but  _Nik._ Summer's coming." She looks at him beseechingly. "You've been darkening up this place with your broodiness  _far_ too long. I simply won't allow it!"

She says it's for his benefit, but all the light streaming in brings out the rose in her cheeks, the gold in her hair, the double-takes as she passes booth after booth refilling coffee cups. So who's the winner here, really?

 

.

.

 

And Caroline, Caroline glows.

He spies her leaning over the counter to flirt with the Salvatore boys, giggling her way into getting Bonnie Bennett buy get another slice of butter pecan, even cheers Professor Saltzman up enough for him to drop more than the usual advocated 20% into the tip jar.

On her days off, people come in and despite already memorizing her schedule, ask him if there's a slight chance of her coming in that day. They barely ask about his absence.

It's infuriating.

On her days  _in_ , she avoids him when she can, leaving no hint of the girl Rebekah claims had visited him every day. She's always flitting away, always asking Rebekah to pass the orders to him or busying herself with the till when it's just the two of them left in the kitchen. "There are only so many ways you can stack those dollars," he tells her, but she never responds.

(He is relieved, he tells himself.

Not that his near-death experience should even mean anything to her, all in a day's work here at the Pie Hole, right? Good riddance. He is relieved.

So very relieved.)

And so Klaus turns to his pies. He forgoes the vegan shortening and the brown rice flour; grabs the Crisco and the butter, smothers more white sugar than is necessary onto his apples and all but throws out the gluten-free dough. If Caroline notices she doesn't say a thing. Once, in the rare moment that their eyes actually meet, instead of turning away as is their custom, she holds his gaze, plucks the forkful of pancake pie that's about to make its way into Marcel's mouth and, very purposefully, puts it in her own.

A mouthful of jelly'd pancakes that are most definitely not gluten-free, all to prove some sort of … vendetta against him.

He narrows his eyes at her and dumps lard into his filling.

It starts off like a joke, those idiotic ones drunk frat boys at parties make, but Caroline walks into the diner one day and suddenly – gone are the gloves and the tights, the cute little sweaters that hugged all the way to her neck, the colourful scarves she loved to wind around her neck. Now, she wears flirty little skirts and strappy sandals, pulls her hair into side-ponytails that show off her apple-white neck.

He sees the way Marcel rakes his eyes appreciatively over her and one day, as if by reflex, he stabs his knife deep in the middle of Marcel's Marcel, its handle vibrating like a warning. "I don't quite like you ogling the waitresses here."

Marcel chortles. "The waitresses? Or do you mean Caroline?"

Klaus leans forward, voice dropping as he reiterates, "I don't quite like you ogling her the way you do my sister."

"Hey man, look – I get it. Rebekah's off limits." Marcel holds his hands up. "But Caroline? She's not your sister."

The murder must be apparent in his eyes (death by skinning, or finally fulfilling all those head-shoved-into-oven fantasies he's had for Kol over the years?) because Marcel covers Klaus' hand with his and gives an amiable smile. "Come now, Klaus. We've been friends for a long time – I wouldn't do that to you. Or to our business."

Klaus lifts his eyebrows, not buying it.

"Look, two things I've picked up in my travels. One," Marcel holds a finger up, "never pet a sleeping Rottweiler." Marcel lets him ruminate for a moment before continuing, "And two… just apologize, Klaus."

Klaus sniffs. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Obviously you did something wrong here. You've been staring. Not very subtle." Marcel picks up his fork. "Women love apologies. Be sincere. Buy her flowers, ask her dancing.  _Apologize_. Make it a good one. Dress it up, bend it over a table…" Marcel grins when Klaus shifts just the slightest bit. "Think about it."

And think about it Klaus does. Compartmentalizes, in fact, the way Elijah would.

The facts were these:

The girl in the alley, that girl had been Rebekah's to save, and he'd struggled with that his whole life; this inability to save, to keep, just for himself, without the fear of it slipping through his death-addled fingers. But she is not Rebekah's – he knows now – and she is far from his. She is her own person, alive and breathing, with choices good and bad alike, and he needs to be able to come to terms with this. The fact that he is one of her choices still causes a painful sort of twisting in his chest; the oven dings like a revelation, and—

—he realizes it isn't a twisting, but it's just as Rebekah had promised: white doves taking flight, six bells a-ringing, right there in that little box of his chest. How so many feelings could  _collect_  in there escapes him: how her laughter, which he has been parched of, had been amassing there for quite some time and it's only now when he misses it that he notices.

She passes through the kitchen to slide a pie out of the oven. He notices her lingering there, palms turned out like she's catching sunlight.

"Are you cold?" he asks, thinking of her scarves.

She shoots him a dark look. It's not a response, but it's something.

 

.

.

 

"Caroline," he chances one day when the diner's empty. About to leave, she looks over her shoulder disinterestedly, and he feels a clutching in his throat.

He opens his mouth.

Nothing.

And so it goes.

 

.

.

 

He imagines—

He doesn't know what he imagines. He imagines brushing her shoulder with his, a quick curl of her hair with his thumb, her flour-dusted fingers dropping a berry in his mouth, brushing his lips ever so softly, but that's— _mate,_ that's fucking impossible.

Conversation lulls outside the kitchen and Rebekah peeks her head in, eyebrow quirked. "What the hell was that noise?"

Klaus, it turns out, had hurled his rolling pin across the room in a fit. "Sorry," he says stiffly, but maybe for an entirely different reason.

 

.

.

 

One day when it's twenty minutes after closing time and he's taking stock of inventory and Caroline is making to grab her coat, he lifts his head from the endless numbers and clears his throat.

The door is wide open, her hand poised on the duct-taped handle. She looks at him, and he looks back, and this time… this time he wants to shake  _himself_  as he feels his throat stuttering yet again. Caroline seems to deflate. He expects her to walk out the door, but she hangs her coat back on the hook and turns to face him fully. "Are we doing this, then?"

"Depends on what you think this is," he says, and god  _fucking_ damnit, now you want to work, you traitorous throat.

She narrows her eyes at him. "You do realize I don't have to stand here and listen to you, right? But here I am. Could you at least make it worth my while?"

And he doesn't know  _why_ , but he finds himself gesturing to the door, "Well, you're welcome to…"

"You see, this is your problem. You leave before anyone can do the same to you, like you're the greatest invention—yeah, don't give me that look.  _Invention_ , because you're a freaking  _robot_ —since sliced bread."

"Actually, the greatest invention to date would have to be—"

"I don't actually  _care_ , Mikaelson. Just hurry up and tell me you're sorry. Tell me how pathetic you feel. God knows you've been looking it for the past few weeks."

"I bloody well can't now, since you've gone and spoilt it," he says irritably. "Why are you always so adamant on having both the first  _and_  last say—"

"—like your apology is some kind of  _gift_ , oh my God – you are such a child." She pauses. "Oh wait, you're not a child. You're my  _boss_. Forgive me for speaking so out of turn."

"Caroline—"

"See? I can do it easily; you're just a big pile of manpain getting stuck in a plane's propellers causing it to crash into a truck, creating one of the biggest manpain-induced traffic jams in history."

Klaus scrubs a hand down his face and snarls, "I'm  _sorry_."

"I accept," Caroline snarks right back. "See you in the morning."

 

.

.

 

Caroline comes in the next day wearing gloves pushed all the way to her elbows.

Klaus doesn't realize he's smiling until Rebekah smacks the back of his head, Table 4 wants their triple berry, what the hell are you gaping like an idiot for?

 

.

.

 

There are puddles on the pavements from the light rain earlier, the late summer days marking their territory by dampening the earth with sun-strewn rain and curling its finger around saplings; coaxing flowers out of the ground, secret colours blooming through the cracks between old bricks. The air smells like clean white linen billowing in the breeze, the night settling around them as they walk home. Kol steps around the puddles. Klaus splashes right through them.

"You've been around more," Klaus remarks, if only to break the silence. It's not an uncomfortable one, but it seemed like the sort of night to have a conversation with your brother – one that isn't weighed down by inconsistent ledgers or arguments about butter or  _the_   _door_  for once.

"Well, Elijah's off working again." Kol says of their brother who had left with the air of someone resigned. But Elijah does so love what he does, even if it took him away from them most of the year. Klaus doesn't blame him; sometimes he catches up with Finn when they cross paths in the occasions where Elijah fancies taking a ship. Finn is so far out of reach, but perhaps it's for the best, what with the Mikael business lately.

"Rebekah's worried," he tells Kol. "I heard her telling Caroline."

"I thought eavesdropping was beneath you."

"You do it," he mutters.

Kol has to laugh at that. "I'll admit I've done far worse."

"And you keep doing them. And we keep forgiving you." It's an accusation; he doesn't pretend otherwise. "Why do you think that is?"

"Because, Nik," Kol explains like he's surprised and tired and exasperated all at once, "Love is all about acceptance and other such sappy things, haven't you learned by now? It's – it's knowing there is always reason behind any considerable choice, even without words. It's just –  _fuck_ , I don't know. Acceptance. Yes, let that sink in. And—oi, where the bleeding  _hell_  are you running off to?"

 

.

.

 

Chest pounding, breath steaming up the glass, he appears at the door with his heart in his throat.

"I thought I was closing up," Caroline says, surprise in the muffled tone of her voice from the other side of the door – but not as surprised as he would have expected. He lets himself in, locks the door behind him, and, almost disoriented, walks into the kitchen. Caroline trails wordlessly behind him. The dishes look like they've long dried, so Klaus isn't quite sure what she's still waiting around for, until he realizes.

She always did have that uncanny ability of just  _knowing_.

Now if only he could articulate it, unfreeze his tongue and let the words out. He turns around. "I have something to say."

That's a start.

Caroline hoists herself up on the scrubbed counter, her claimed spot. He counts it in his head: the counter, the bowl, the wooden spoon, the third booth from the door directly under the display window, all these things she's claimed as her own the minute she walked into this diner. She tilts her head and looks at him so earnestly that all he can do is look back.

The clock ticks. He is still by the door.

He is always by the door, he realizes. Always looking in on her.

Well, mate – now's the time.  _Say_ something.

"You really suck at this."

He walks to his work table, leans against it as he always does with his hands in his pockets. The toes of her shoes brush softly against his shins. "I'm not quite sure how to go about it."

"Use a metaphor."

"I don't think so, Caroline." He shakes his head, but he is smiling at her, and he doesn't know why, or maybe he does.

"Then," she begins slowly, peeking at him from beneath her eyelashes, "use your hands."

He stares at her.

She leans forward and very gently pulls his hands out of his pockets, cupping his hands in hers; he can feel how warm her hands are through the smooth silk.

He looks down at their intertwined fingers and clears his throat.

"I trust you," she says, and it's remarkable how she can make herself to be so  _soft_  without even him having to touch her.

"Doesn't this…" He shakes their hands a little, skin over glove, "bother you in the slightest?"

Caroline shrugs. "I don't know. I mean, yeah, it sucks. But maybe I like the pain. Keeps me anchored."

"And you trust me?"

She frowns when he disentangles his hand from hers. "Isn't that what I just said?"

"Just making sure."

He steps closer.

Swallows when he hears her breath hitch.

Ever so slowly, he traces a trembling finger around the scarf knotted around her neck before pulling at it. He listens to it rustling against her dress, her hair. The room is filled with a strange stillness, his blood pounding entirely too loud in his ears as he lifts it up to her face. Through the fabric her face is painted in purples and blues, and it's like peering through Alice's looking glass. Her eyes, wide and unblinking, watching his every move. Waiting.

He wonders if she's not breathing the way he isn't, with his face drawing closer to hers—

"Are—" This time it's her whose voice falters. It sounds shaky, too high. "Are you going to kiss me?"

His heart is caught in his throat, his voice too hoarse, too thirsty, he cannot speak. He tries, a pale imitation of sound, but it sounds pained almost, a grunt.

Oh, fuck this.

Caroline makes a noise, something like surprise, when their lips meet. His lips brush against the thin material of her scarf, but he can feel how soft her lips are. And then she parts her lips and he almost surges forward: how can he just stand there so  _still_  when he can  _taste_  her now, can feel her hot breath wetting his lips, the dampness of the kiss soaking through the scarf, something warm and distinctly Caroline filling his mouth, filling him up.

She takes in a shuddering breath when he pulls away, his shirt clutched in her fingers.

"Were you holding your breath the entire time?"

"That's the basis of kissing, Klaus," she says, but the sarcasm is weak at best, what with her nails digging into his chest. His lips brush against her scarf. He can still feel her lips shaped around his. He closes his eyes.

"Okay, look. You're supposed to close your eyes  _during_ a kiss, not aft… Like, have you even done this before?"

"You're ruining a perfectly good moment," Klaus murmurs into her scarf. He feels her nose nudge his, scratchy through the fabric, feels her blow softly on his lips which sends a shiver down his back.

"Am I?" she whispers, before kissing him again. She swallows down his muffled groan, pulls him closer with her hands still gripping his shirt, but cautiously: her movements are liquid and he has to gasp in a breath when her fingers travel lower, splaying her fingers across his stomach. He hasn't realized how starved for touch he is, or how her legs have spread enough to allow him room to lean in, to let his hands, wrapped in that scarf, cage her against the wall.

"Glitter," he observes, sewn into the scarf. Rather bemusedly he thinks she belongs in a circus, smoke in the air and lights in her eyes, skin splashed with moonlight strained like a sieve through coloured tents. She seems worlds away, but her knee is pressed against his inner thigh and it's – it feels very much real.

"We should stop," he says with a tune of regret. "Before this gets out of hand."

"We should." But Caroline has an impish smile on her face. "I mean, I wanted to, but I didn't realize how easily set off you are…" She trails off, running her calf against his leg, and  _god damn_ her. "You want me very badly."

"I do," Klaus admits feverishly, trying his hardest to remain grounded, but Caroline isn't satisfied with that, no—she gathers the front of his shirt in a tight pinch and pulls him closer, and he swallows. "For the longest – shit, Caroline, you weren't meant to know."

Her sharp breath of indignance ripples across the scarf. "And why the hell not?"

Desperate.  _God_  he sounds desperate, but once the words start spilling out they don't seem to stop. "So many things, Caroline – there was Mikael, and now this—we can't have this, I can't  _touch_ you and God knows I want to.”

Caroline lifts her chin, and she looks so frightening, so unlike Caroline that he gulps. "Good. Now touch me."

Touch her. He blinks, there's stars in his eyes, had he heard wro—?

Caroline looks mad, there is a mad, mad glint in her eyes, a red blooming in her cheeks, and she's never been more beautiful. “Like this,” she whispers.

And like this, she pries the scarf from his clenched fists and slowly, _slowly_ , laces her gloved fingers through his, like a boat pulled ashore his hands are guided to her hips. _Start here_ , she seems to say with the recline of her back. He traces the neat trim of her dress with a light finger, chances a look into her eyes before moving down. Her thighs, she feels them jerk as he smooths his hands over them, then down to her knees. He goes back to her face, wraps a hand in her scarf and cups her cheek, memorizing the rise of her cheekbones and the slope of her nose. The curve of her lips, the way she kisses his fingers. Her curls bounce in his hands, the way he’d sought out in his dreams. She smiles against his thumb. He leans forward and kisses her lashes, her brow, then her lips again, carefully, _so_ carefully.

She sighs into the scarf, he drinks it in. When they break apart, she looks dazed and blinking – he imagines he must look the same.

It is awhile before they can do anything other than look at each other.

And Caroline, even then, says: "So I'm thinking you have great form – like,  _really_  great form, good to know your mouth does more than snark, but…"

Through the daze, Klaus scowls. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying you could use the practice," she says, smiling salaciously up at him. "I'm saying we should make out again. Want to make out again?"

"I— _yes_ ," he blurts out before he can affect some semblance of self-restraint, but she's already sliding down the counter.

She loops her scarf around his neck, pulls him closer. He takes a pointed half a step back and Caroline rolls her eyes. "So, work table?"

"I bake my pies there, Caroline."

"The counter up front."

"The till gets in the way."

"The door, then?"

He thinks about it. "Elijah would be furious."

"Perfect." She shoots him a grin that he can't help but return when she tugs him out the room; she has him thrown against the door even before he tells her Caroline love, mind the door handle – It's quite fragile still, it might fa—

It falls off.

Alright then.

He can't find it in himself to care when her hands are on his chest, when he is smiling up at him that way. Klaus lifts her scarf and happily obliges as much as he can, which is good, really – for in two weeks, three days and eighteen hours she would be – she would be…

Oh, you already know.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you were (un)lucky enough to catch this story the first time around, then you’ll know the ending to this chapter has been altered slightly. What has changed, I won’t tell you in order not to compromise your enjoyment of this story. Just know that I wrote something that I wasn’t too particularly happy with, and felt so torn by it I took it down and didn’t look at it again for months. The direction of this fic remains largely unchanged, so don’t you worry about that. I hope you stay for a little while longer, we’re almost there!


End file.
